monkey misreading
Just saw a spam subject line that said: MONEY OR LOVE? WHY NOT BOTH? Only at first glance I misread the first word, so I thought it said: MONKEY OR...
Ambiguous headline
AP headline this morning: Obama ventures back to hurting region _ with money I think that underscore was intended to be a dash, but either way, I initially read the...
maieusiophilia
No word has any right to that many vowels. It means pregnancy fetishism....
Marmoset there’d be days like this
I don't seem to have ever linked to the brilliant O Fortuna misheard lyrics video, which plays "O Fortuna" while showing what the lyrics might be. Plus visual interpretations of...
Wreck an icing’s beach again
Back in the late '90s, I wrote a column on computer speech recognition. The state of the art has progressed somewhat since then. One of the new uses for the...
First occurrence of “Ms.”
Ben Zimmer may have tracked down the first use of the word "Ms." Believe it or not, the word was suggested in 1901 in the Springfield, Massachusetts Sunday Republican. The...
Special English
I had previously heard of Basic English, a proposed simplified English with an 850-word core vocabulary. (In case you're curious, a Basic English website has some examples.) But I hadn't...
protein name
There's a drug called rapamycin, which is showing promising results in anti-aging studies. But that's not why I'm mentioning it here. I'm mentioning it because of this sentence from the...
Mantisisms
I've been meaning for a while to collect in one place all the quotes from my sardonic pal Jack Mantis. Recently discovered the "pages" publishing system in Movable Type—sort of...
Scrabble-izer
Ever wanted to send someone an online message spelled out in Scrabble tiles? Use Scrabble-izer! After you've Scrabble-ized your message, you can email or post the URL. For example, Bill...