If you don’t know what to write, they say, just write. Don’t worry about what to write, just keep going. Of course, this isn’t really necessary when you’re writing for a blog. I could just not post anything. I’ve no problem taking a day off now and then. Only, at the moment, I’ve got a bit of an itch to write something. So I’m just going to write for a little bit and see where it takes me.
…hand? Or, whatever you want really, but again, like yesterday, you can imagine that I’m thinking of something else. Because yesterday I got a good firm grasp of how we use synonyms for penises as insults, now I want to do the same thing from a female perspective. Well, not really from a female perspective I suppose.
You can imagine any word you like to finish that sentence. Personally, I’m thinking of a few different words. Words that all have two things in common: they can be used to insult a man, and refer to the male sexual organ (so be forewarned: if you’re sensitive to bad language, I’ll be swinging a lot of it round willy-nilly in the next few paragraphs).
So Twitter has been trying to entice me recently, with fake profiles following me which look semi-legit, until I follow them back and they send me messages about these online games. And doubtless the links just lead to horrible viruses (I’m still trying to figure out Twitter’s angle by the way. It usually takes me a few months to figure out each social medium, and how to use it properly. I’m not there with Twitter yet).
Anyway, what intrigued me most about these dodgy ads was their use of the word addicting. This is normally the point where I get quite reasonable and say something like, Well, you might think it’s correct to say addictive, and that addicting is wrong, but actually it’s ok to use both.
To be honest though, I hate addicting. Both my heart and my brain tell me that it’s wrong, and that addictive is right, and that’s it. Addicting looks stupid, it sounds stupid, and it doesn’t seem to make much sense, linguistically. That being said, people do say addicting, so I’m at least going to investigate why they might do that.
Good question, I’m very glad you asked. There are about ten words in English that end in –mb, but have a silent B. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
As you can see, it’s a fairly common phenomenon, but what’s the story behind it?
Thank you Lise for nominating me for the Versatile Blogger Award! You should head to her blog Lushtivity to read her great variety of posts on books, beauty, games, and lifestyle. With all those different topics, she’s a worth winner of this award! I’m not sure how versatile I am, except perhaps in the sense that I might sometimes write about different words, or different grammar points.
Regardless, here I am, so, per the rules of the award, I’ll endeavour to think of seven interesting facts about myself:
As I alluded to yesterday, I recently saw Spider-man Homecoming with my nephews. It made me think again about superhero names. I touched on them briefly before, thinking about how straightforward they are. The majority of the most popular ones are simple compound nouns, featuring an adjective or noun that defines the character, followed by man or woman (or girl). Spider-man. Batman. Superman. Wonder Woman, etc. The practical, pragmatic explanation for this is to make the characters easily recognisable, and not confused for a rival publisher’s characters. That’s why, after all, Spider-man has his hyphen.
English-Language Thoughts 