Can you think of an English word, not borrowed from another language, that has an accent or other diacritic? (a diacritic is simply any glyph added to a letter: see here for examples).
A Touch of Diaeresis
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Riveting Stuff!
Have you ever noticed that riveting can have two meanings? It can mean fascinating, but also the action of fixing rivets (metal pins) to a surface (I was thinking about this recently after hearing someone talk about the riveters who worked on the Titanic). It might seem odd that it can have these two meanings, but if you think about it, it makes sense.
Less or Fewer?
A pretty simple one today: this is something that many people are curious about. Both are clearly similar, but what’s the difference between them?
Is Your Water Running?
Then you’d better catch it!
Ha!
Isn’t it a little strange that we refer to running water?
Mr, Mrs, and Ms
Teaching French-speaking teenagers recently, I was momentarily surprised when they started to call me Mister. Then I remembered that in French the word monsieur can be used like sir in American English. It doesn’t need to come before a surname, like Mister in English, so most students refer to their male teachers as Monsieur, as we use Sir in English. But they of course understandably translated monsieur to mister.
We use sir to refer to a teacher in most varieties of English too, but not to refer to a man in general when we don’t know his name. It’s only really used in that way in American English.
Mister though, is used in basically the same way in every form of English, as the standard honorific for an adult male. Isn’t it curious though, that for women there are three honorifics: Miss, Ms, and Mrs?
Begging the Question
Writing about the etymology of the word clock yesterday reminded me of when I wrote about the word to decimate recently, and how people are fond of citing its original meaning as being to reduce by 10%, even though that’s not true.
As I said before, I can understand people having this misconception, and I can understand the instinct to correct people. There have always been people who’ve acted this way about language, but recently I’ve noticed more and more people taking such a prescriptive approach to English.
The Word Clock? Now that Rings a Bell…
The word clock has quite a long history, unsurprising for such a common and simple word.
English-Language Thoughts 