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On Dogs Catching Vehicles
In Texas this month for the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, I picked up a copy of the local alternative weekly, The Austin Chronicle. It turned out to be the year-in-review issue....
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[Name] [No Comma] the [Category of Thing]
Rocky the Cock-a-Tzu When the satirist John Oliver returned to his HBO show from hiatus on February 12, he said the happenings of the world had left him kind of depressed. The Chicago Tribune...
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Why Don’t Athletes Have Good Nicknames Anymore?
Ken “The Rat” Linseman Why don’t ballplayers have good nicknames anymore? Sure, in baseball there is Alex (A-Rod) Rodriguez, in football Calvin (Megatron) Johnson, and in basketball LeBron (King)...
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On, and In, the Bubble
Continuing on the subject of sports, March Madness, aka the Big Dance, aka the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, is nearly upon us, bringing to mind the subject of basketball catch phrases, buzzwords,...
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Who Really Said That?
For a time in my 20s, I worked as “assistant to the publisher” at Schocken Books, now part of Random House. Like anyone with that sort of glorified-secretary position, I took on a lot of tasks that...
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Comey, I Salute You!
Trump pressing Comey’s flesh the day after his inauguration. Photo: Andrew Harrer via Getty Images Last week’s congressional testimony by James Comey was fascinating to anyone interested in politics,...
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The Half-Life of Metaphors
Samuel Taylor Coleridge The adjective weaponized — meaning “adapted for use as a weapon, equipped with weapons,” or more broadly, “militarized” — dates only to 1956, according to the Oxford English...
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‘Dictionary of American Regional English’ Speaks!
Chronicle illustration by Ellen Winkler If you read my posts, you may be familiar by now with the grand six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English, completed in print in 2013, but continuing...
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Of Cans and Cabooses
Tyler Silvest, via Flicker On Monday, a Colorado jury found that a Denver disc jockey had in fact committed assault and battery against Taylor Swift during a pre-concert photo session in 2013. Some...
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DIY Digital Humanities
The digital humanities are known for major-infrastructure projects, such as data-crunching the contents of capacious corpora and charting the movement of vast numbers of people and ideas over space and...
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Totality
The word totally has grown so overused that I was struck, last week, by the power of its near cousin, totality, describing the two or three minutes, along the arc of the much-heralded solar eclipse,...
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Christopher Columbus’s Catalan-Inflected Language
Columbus monument in Barcelona, with helicopter bearing symbol of Catalonia (Photo by Carles Ribas, El País) The violence surrounding the Catalan independence referendum on October 1 has put Spanish...
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The National Anthem and Me
It’s been years, now, since I stood up when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. Mine has not been a protest akin to the controversial kneeling that’s got right-wing pundits’ knickers in a twist....
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Do Courtesy Titles Matter?
I like to think I’m not fussy about honorifics. I don’t tell my undergraduate students how to address me. The current convention seems to be Professor X, though friends who teach at research...
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‘Nothing to See Here’: the Evolution of a Catchphrase
These quotes all appeared in the last week: “Nothing to see here: Man casually puts on deodorant; officers find meth in deodorant.” –Headline in Northwest Florida Daily News. “A U.S. Steel spokeswoman...
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Splendor in the Tall Grass
Knowing my interest in British words and expressions crossing to the United States, Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, tweeted me a quote from a November 30...
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Who You Gonna Call?
How old am I? This old: I never heard the term ghosting before I read “Cat Person,” the New Yorker story that went viral in early December. (Let us pause a moment here, to appreciate the latter part...
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The Joy of Predictive Text
xkcd.com The writer John Kelly recently tweeted: For those not familiar with the term, here’s a definition of predictive text courtesy of whatis.com: “an input technology that facilitates typing on a...
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Hearts and Ashes
Emperor Claudius II slaying Valentine, from a copy of Speculum Historiale, Vincent of Beauvais, c. 1335, Bibliothèque nationale de France February 14, 2018, brings about the rare concatenation of two...
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The Last Time I Saw Paris
George Whitman with his daughter, Sylvia (named for Sylvia Beach) Long ago, in a world preceding the European Union, the euro, and the tsunami of American students who go to Paris every semester for...
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