A flu by any other name, or, flu versioning
Makers of computer software and hardware have to give each new version of a given product a new label or name, to distinguish it from other versions. There are a...
Band name
Just saw this headine: Supreme Court Rules that Government Can Fine for 'Fleeting Expletives' --Washington Post, April 28, 2009 Wouldn't "The Fleeting Expletives" be a good band name?...
foul play
It struck me the other day that "foul play" is an odd sort of euphemism for murder. "Play"? What kind of play? The Phrase Finder says Shakespeare probably coined the...
Walking into a bar
Someone recently pointed me to A Guy Goes into a Bar, a list of guy-walks-into-bar jokes. I figured they would probably be mostly dumb, but it turns out there are...
thrupenny bits
Just encountered a comment in an article on Britain's Got Talent that refers to "a dancer who was show[ing] her thrupennie bits to the world." Thruppence, or the threepenny bit,...
Jacques Brel is alive and translated, sort of
I was working on various things while listening to music in the background, and the song "Marathon" came on, from the 1968 cast recording of Jacques Brel Is Alive and...
Amusing juxtapositions at Time
I've recently read several news articles at time.com, and I keep being struck (and annoyed) by their links to marginally-related sets of pictures. The links appear in parentheses at the...
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....