obnubilate
Thanks to Naomi B for my favorite word of the week. It means to becloud or obscure something. Example: "It is the pity of the world, Dr. McAdam, to see...
Block those metaphors
Benedict Carey of the New York Times sure does like using metaphors to describe science stuff. At least, that's the conclusion I draw from reading his article Brain Researchers Open...
Multilingual 404
Aaron H points to this cute multilingual file-not-found page. Not to be taken too seriously, especially the dialect versions in English and quasi-English....
Latest spam subject lines
My favorite spam subject lines of the day: First: the social networking site no one else knows about Now I want to generalize that to a sort of a game:...
o’clock
I recently encountered the phrase pattern "[activity noun x] o'clock" meaning "it's time to do x": once as "sex o'clock" (link is not work-safe), once as "pray o'clock" (in an...
cold turkey
Twig asked me about the origin of the phrase "cold turkey." I didn't know, so I looked it up. No info at Quinion's World Wide Words, which is my most...
Months and movies
I stopped by Netflix today, and the system recommended two movies that had titles with month names in them. So here's today's challenge: come up with a set of twelve...
News Mondegreen
Was half-listening to NPR news this morning, and thought I heard a reporter say that something was intended to "shore up the Gaza sea-spire." I thought to myself, "Neat--I don't...
Is it a real word?
Ta-Nehisi Coates talks with OED editor Jesse Sheidlower about whether "conversate" is a word. I And dictionary editors in general. Lexicographer Erin McKean gave a talk at TED in 2007...
Cute tees
Happened across the BustedTees T-shirt company the other day. (Run by the CollegeHumor.com people.) Most of the T-shirt companies I see have a bunch of crass, obnoxious, racist, sexist, and...