I ought to have said "an ideologically correct student" rather than "a conscientious student." Oh, well, esprit d'escalier and all that. Pierre Abbat once found a question and its answer on the same page of a Farsi dictionary: cheqadr? chahel. (how many? forty.) He adds: "What is really striking is that this could as easily […]
Electronic dictionaries make it quick and easy to look things up. You don't have to search through thousands of pages to find your word; you don't even have to know the order of the alphabet. Some electronic dictionaries will even correct your spelling if you spell your word wrong. Unfortunately, electronic dictionaries also eliminate the […]
Here are the originals of the Chaucer and Shakespeare quotations I mangled: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and […]
Few modern writers would dream of submitting a manuscript without running it through a spellchecker first. Alas, in olden days, many famous writers had no access to computers, and were thus forced to submit manuscripts rife with typos and idiosyncratic spellings. Publishers were often lax in those days and failed to notice the blatant spelling […]
Stacey points out that a doctor is one who doctors, and an engineer is one who engineers. She adds: My mother tells me of an infamous familial Scrabble game in which my great uncle tried to get away with adding the "re" prefix to the word "zoom" on the table, producing "'rezoom'...to zoom more than […]
In many cases a verb x has a corresponding noun (often formed by adding "-er" or "-or" to the verb) meaning "one who does x." For instance, the verb "to spoil" corresponds to the noun "spoiler," meaning "one who spoils." Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that to find out what a "burglar" does, one […]
It's been a full year since I started doing these columns.... Time flies. To accompany you into the new year, here are a couple of miscellaneous alphabetic amusements. What comes next in the following series of names? Partial credit for getting the initial letter right. Wawona Vicente Ulloa Taraval Santiago Rivera Quintara Pacheco Ortega Noriega […]
Samuel Goldstein provides another folkloric example of a machine-translated proverb: English: Out of sight, out of mind. English—>Russian—>English: Invisible lunatic. I'd seen it before (in the same place as the vodka bit—perhaps a Smullyan book?) but had forgotten it. (Last updated: 17 March 1998) Back to column Z
"I said it in Hebrew—I said it in Dutch— I said it in German and Greek: But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak!" —The Baker, Fit the Fourth, The Hunting of the Snark My column is too often English-centric. There's a sad reason for that: although I […]
Matt Brocchini searched through two years' worth of his saved email to find all the lines that began with the word "because"; then he arranged those lines in alphabetical order. (Or at least his computer's idea of alphabetical order.) The resulting found art should provide an explanation for any occasion. I have taken the liberty […]