If you’re a thrifty person, you might be interested to know that you can resharpen an old razor blade by rubbing it a few times along some denim (in the opposite direction you shave).
But wait: should that just be sharpen!?
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Don’t worry/be greatly disappointed (delete as appropriate): I’m not going to write about Tik Tok. I saw the name of the app recently, and thought about how I haven’t written about the origin of its name, as I have other social media.
But then, there’s not really much to write about, is there? It did set me thinking about tick tock specifically, as well as the curious fact that clocks don’t go tick tock. They go tick tick (and so on).
So why do we say tick tock?
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Good question, and one I’ve been asking myself a lot while I’ve been writing lately.
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I came across an interesting mistranslation recently (well, I come across quite a few around Sicily, but you get used to the more ordinary ones after a while). Continue reading
Hello from quarantine!
Yes, I’m currently under quarantine here in Palermo, as part of the national lockdown in Italy to curb the spread of COVID-19. Continue reading
I’ve often wondered why we use the word derby to refer to a match between two sporting rivals (in most forms of English at least, as the term crosstown rivalry is also used in the United States), considering that Derby is also the name of a city in England. I’d always imagined there must be a connection between the two uses of the word. Continue reading
I learned recently about the existence of kangaroo words: words that contain the letters of a synonymous word (in the correct sequence) within themselves. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 