Tag Archives: language

Dreamwork

Last night, in the midst of typically inchoate and unrememberable dreams, I came up with two crossword clues that I somehow did remember: 1. _ _ _ _ Tsar did not place this atop Kremlin tower 2. _ _ _ … Continue reading

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Hydrosonic

Months ago, Trump elicited guffaws in the non-Trumpist press and social media when he bragged about an amazing new “hydrosonic missile” purportedly under development. In the intervening time he has repeated the phrase—today, for instance: Note how he uses both … Continue reading

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Clausectomy

Josh Marshall, among many others, noted the tendentious editing perpetrated a month ago by the Don’s personal attorney general in ever so briefly summarizing the Mueller report, which was finally released today, sort of (lots of missing stuff). What William … Continue reading

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Phew!

“There are less people here today than yesterday.” It’s fewer, people! Fewer people!* It’s an easy rule. I think you can handle it, my friends. If you’re talking about a bunch of things (multiple objects), you use fewer, fewest. Example: … Continue reading

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Eulenspiegel’d

Our poor little language gets pranked again. It’s Thursday, and if you happen to be in Arlington, Virginia, and if you like oysters, you can eat raw ones at a certain restaurant, from 4:00 p.m. “til supplies last.” (I’ll wait while … Continue reading

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Disconnect

One hopes the neighbors have found a common language even if their yard sculptures have not.

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Prefix

You may think this is about a linguistic nicety, the bit that comes before the main part and imparts a nice twist—something came before, or after (pre-, post-); or the word sort of applies (pseudo-); or the action is being done … Continue reading

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Crowdsourced

Some guy at Slate went to a lot of effort to let us know the ten worst catchphrases of 2011. I confess that the only reason I looked at it was to see if it included an annoying tic I … Continue reading

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Nots

To kick off the new year, here’s a story by a Russian writer with a very Polish name: Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky. I’m just starting to explore his works, only a few of which have appeared in English. I thought I’d add … Continue reading

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UTF-8

Encoding (aka code pages)? No one gives a damn about encoding! True enough. It’s so deeply geeky, it’s hard to imagine any normal person knowing the difference between CP1251 and KOI8-R, for instance. Windows had code pages coming out the … Continue reading

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