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Old Hat (Warning: Adult Content!)
I recently reread the brilliant New Yorker piece by Jack Winter titled “How I Met My Wife,” as I prepared for a short radio segment about negative words that don’t have positive counterparts. Winter...
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Raising the Roof
Well, we have a government again. But since the debates over money and politics are due to rev up before their jets have even cooled, let’s take a moment to look at one very messy metaphor. I’m...
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For some time, I have been planning to write a Lingua Franca post on Somebody Said Something Stupid Syndrome. SSSSS (as I abbreviate it) begins when an individual writes or is recorded as saying...
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Sports in Everyday Speech
The Red Sox celebrate their World Series win. Photo: EPA/Jason Szenes Last week the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, and while other folks were debating the bushy beards and the obstruction call, I...
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A Whole Nother Juncture
For some reason, my ears were tuned to a whole nother frequency last week. That is, I heard the word nother everywhere I turned. Mostly it followed the word whole, though I’d swear someone said,...
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The Import of All Caps
Let’s be clear: using ALL CAPS in texting and on Facebook isn’t just about yelling anymore. Now, I must admit that I don’t actually have definitive evidence that in the early days of email and...
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Google Reads Your Emails?
Microsoft’s astonishingly scurrilous campaign to damage confidence in Gmail is still active after nearly 10 years. Large ads in magazines repeat content from the Google-baiting website...
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Recombobulating
We’re nearing the end of the year, which has me thinking about the annual Word of the Year vote at the American Dialect Society meeting in January. We’ll be in Minneapolis this year, and Grant Barrett...
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Siri’s Sex Change
I don’t have Siri, and so my experience of Apple’s virtual personal assistant is limited to eavesdropping on my friends’ iPhones. But it has struck me as fascinating that the voice for several years...
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Obama’s State of the Onion
Barack Obama in 2014(Image from wrcbtv.com) I’m saturated with Obama’s rhetoric. I’m not talking about his politics, which, in and of themselves, have been disappointing. The list of miscalculations,...
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The Predictive Fallacy
A cool data-visualization website called Information Is Beautiful has a page titled “Rhetological Fallacies: Errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical thinking.” Here’s a taste: If the creator,...
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Do Chicanos Have an Inferiority Complex?
The etymology of Chicano is surrounded in mystery. I’ve seen its roots traced to Nahuatl, specifically to the term Mexica, as the people encountered by Hernán Cortéz and his soldiers conquering...
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Perfect!
This past weekend I escaped the polar vortex for a few days of vacation in warmer climes, and I found myself thinking a lot about the word perfect. It had nothing to do with the weather (which was...
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Final Madness
We’ve finally come to the end of Language Madness, and not a moment too soon. Just as Kentucky and Connecticut, two storied programs, will face off tonight in the NCAA men’s basketball finals (finals...
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Which Side Are You On?
Theodore Parker When Vladimir Putin seized Crimea, President Obama said, “Russia is on the wrong side of history on this.” Secretary of State John Kerry concurred, using exactly the same phrase. They...
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On Clarity
What do John Boehner and Rachel Maddow have in common?Image: Screen shot from MSNBC, via The Blaze One cannot but be dismayed by the extent to which pollution of thought is endemic in our culture. The...
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Yo Hablo HTML
We are nearly five months into Britain’s “Year of Code,” an effort to promote computer-coding skills among Britons young and old. The British media’s coverage spiked in February, when the campaign’s...
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It’s a Grand Old Bargain
Keeler and Powell: “It was grand of you to come!” I read in USA Today on Tuesday that Detroit’s Big Three auto makers have “committed $26-million to the grand bargain on which much of the city’s exit...
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Sono Tornata!
Casa Dante in Perano: good wine, bad Wi-Fi Having left my post at Lingua Franca four months ago to work on a book and (very incidentally) dabble in Italian, I thought I’d launch my return (Sono tornata...
View ArticleThe True Secret of Office Packing
My all-time favorite Chronicle article, “Yagoda’s Unfamiliar Quotations” (mentioned here once before, in The Case of the Extra Word), is a reminiscence about a collection of unquoted...
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