Tag Archive: Word For The Wise
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Word for the Wise : All that
We heard from a fellow concerned about his potential misuse of the word all. With the encouragement of a colleague, our correspondent had already managed to excise the term alls (as in alls I’m doing is talking) from his speech. The fellow reported that he replaced what he called “a particularly poorly devised phrase” with [...]
Word for the Wise : Pasta and noodle
October is National Pasta Month. Folks eager to roll out their dough might want to first noodle around with this question: when do you call it pasta and when do you call it noodles? Etymologists can’t dish up a lot of history about the word noodle. They do know that the English noodle, which first [...]
Word for the Wise : Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Today we remember Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet who gave us Kublai Khan and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and who was born on October 21, 1772. When Coleridge wrote about the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,” he was offering his explanation of what constitutes “poetic faith.” Those well-known phrases were one [...]
Word for the Wise: The Great Vowel Shift
On October 25th in the year 1400 the great poet Geoffrey Chaucer died. Linguists use his passing to mark the beginning of evolution from Middle English to Modern English. One of the most significant linguistic events of that transition was the Great Vowel Shift, a dramatic change in the pronunciation of the long vowels that [...]
Word for the Wise: Hunky-dory
A friend passed along the following bit of apocrypha. It seems that during the last century, the Japanese port city of Yokohama was home to a street named Hunko-dori. The sailor who could find his way to Hunko-dori could almost certainly find his way back to his ship,
Word for the Wise: Naval lingo
October 27th is Navy Day. To make sure this celebration doesn’t leave you high and dry – or even at sea – when it comes to the language of the open sea, today we’ll take a look at some lingo born on the high seas but now used by landlubbers.
Word for the Wise: Ending with a preposition
According to the Western Church, October 28th is the Feast Day of Saint Jude, the patron saint of desperate, even hopeless, causes. That makes today a particularly suitable time to try to debunk what the grammarian H.W. Fowler called a "cherished superstition": the notion that English speakers should never end a sentence with a preposition. [...]
Word for the Wise: Homographs
Some time ago a listener challenged us to think of instances of words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently. For example, lead is pronounced both as \leed\ (as in, "The polls show the incumbent maintaining her lead") and as \led\ (as in, "The lead levels remain distressingly high"). In addition to lead, we [...]
Word for the Wise: Guess the year
Today we present a word quiz and a history quiz. Why history? Because a sound knowledge of history will help you come up with the correct answer. What we’re looking for is the year that the following words were first spotted in print: lifestyle, windchill, pollster, and Ashcan, capitalized. We’ll help a little by telling [...]
Word for the Wise : Scriveners & diaskeuasts
Since September is Be Kind to Editors and Writers Month, today we tip our hats to hardworking scriveners and diaskeuasts. If you read Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, you probably know that a scrivener is a professional or public copyist or writer; a scribe. The word scrivener is itself an alteration of scribe,
