“A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families”
The title of this article and the blurb at the top of the article seem to suggest that everyone uses the same names for Lego pieces, but in fact part...
HUDLOOMS
Best spam subject line of the week: RE: BE CAREFUL OF THE HUDLOOMS I thought perhaps a HUDLOOM was a weaving device containing a Heads-Up Display. Or perhaps some kind...
Bucket of Does
I saw a billboard advertising the new Droid cell phone yesterday. It had a hard-edged and manly sort of high-tech industrial look to it, and it said: A BARE-KNUCKLED BUCKET...
In which I appear in the Telegraph, sort of
The Telegraph recently featured a list of top 10 Internet "laws", starting of course with Godwin's Law. Sure enough, there at #4 is Skitt's Law, a.k.a. Muphry's Law (sic), a.k.a....
axis mundi
The other day, I read a submission that included the phrase "Axis Mundi." There were a lot of other unfamiliar phrases in the story, so I figured it was just...
esculent
"Esculent" is apparently a synonym for "edible." It's been appearing in print since 1626, but I only just encountered it for the first time in Wikipedia....
Indian English
I continue to be intrigued by the differences between British/American English and Indian English. I also wonder regularly if some of the grammatical problems I see in submissions written by...
Spanish profanity
Recently happened across the Wikipedia article on Spanish profanity. The little I've read of it so far seems to be useful and interesting. See also the articles on Portuguese profanity,...
snib
To "snib" a door is to fasten or bar it. Just came across it in a submission; turns out to have been used by J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle,...
organ of benevolence
I've never previously read A Christmas Carol. Happened across it in an iPhone edition recently, discovered that it's quite short (about 30,000 words—I had always assumed it was hundreds of...