laser sharp
A few months ago, I encountered a news article that referred to “laser-sharp focus.” I was amused by what I thought was a recombinant idiom, but then when I Googled...
Kryptonian
Recently happened across the Kryptonian Language Project: “an ongoing effort to flesh out a full working language for the home planet of one of the most popular fictional characters in...
South Asia
Before I met Mary Anne, I had never heard the term “South Asia.” And I keep running into white Americans who either aren't familiar with the term or misinterpret it,...
Roman numerals in film sequel titles
Nice article at Slate on the rise and fall of Roman numerals in titles of film sequels, from The Godfather Part II (1974) to The Hangover Part II (2011). Among...
Resource for English questions
Jim recently pointed me to the English Language and Usage Stack Exchange site. For those unfamiliar with Stack Exchange, it's a collection of websites on various topics that are designed...
Recombinant metaphors: smoking duck
A Reuters article about the Higgs boson provides a lovely mixed metaphor from Oliver Buchmueller, one of the CERN researchers: If I were a betting man, I would bet that...
boson
I've known the word boson for years, but I don't think I knew until recently that it's named after Indian physicist Satyendranath Bose (also written “Satyendra Nath Bose”), as in...
desenrascanço
Desenrascanço is a Portuguese word more or less meaning “disentanglement,” used to refer to improvising solutions, or, as one web page puts it, “an ability to solve a problem without...
vagina et alia
The brouhaha over a Michigan state Representative being banned from speaking on the House floor after saying the word “vagina” has led to, among other outcomes, a spate of articles...
Truncated senders
In my mail interface, there's a column showing the name of the sender of the email, but that column isn't very wide. So the mail application truncates long sender names...