I saw the above poster today and naturally my eye was drawn to that word: animations.
It needs to be said that this poster probably wasn’t written by a native English speaker, and by animations they probably didn’t mean cartoons, which is what most English speakers would take it to mean. So with that in mind: what do you think animations means here?
Imagine, completely hypothetically, that the President of Russia had information he could use to blackmail the President of the United States. Crazy, I know, but reading about this possibility recently made me think about the word blackmail. Continue reading
Yes, but why? Continue reading
I was thinking this morning that the word spot is one of those simple unassuming words that actually has a lot of quite different meanings, and can be used as verb and a noun.
I find it particularly interesting in that it began with a more abstract, poetic meaning, and later on came to be used in more mundane ways. Continue reading
I was thinking yesterday about how I’m a bit of a dilettante when it comes to music. I like a lot of acts and genres, but I couldn’t narrow my preferences down to anything very particular. Continue reading
I was reading this evening about different names for various types of words (a man’s got to relax somehow). Some I’ve mentioned here before, like ideophones. But I came across one term I’d never heard of before: a nonce word. Continue reading
Well, obviously you are.
I overheard that sentence yesterday while writing my last post and enjoying a coffee (and I don’t normally eavesdrop, but it was difficult not to overhear the lady who said the above). It seemed strange for a few reasons. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 