Would you like tea? You would? Great! But please, take a seat, because this is going to get complicated.
What’s for Tea?
English language thoughts
Guns N’ Roses
Mentioning Guns N’ Roses yesterday, I realised something: their use of punctuation in their name is perhaps not strictly correct!
Live and Let Die
The song “Live and Let Die” came on the radio this morning, and it made me think: is this phrase now better-known than the original phrase (live and let live) that it references?
From QWERTY to AZERTY
I left my laptop in to be repaired today, which was a pretty smooth operation until I realised I don’t know the French word for hinges. All this means that I’m currently typing this on an AZERTY keyboard.
Blond on Blonde
You may have noticed yesterday, that I wrote the following, ungainly looking thing:
blond(e)
Why put the E inside parentheses, some of you might have furiously asked? Or perhaps you slammed your fist on the table and angrily wondered why I even bothered including the E at all. Well, as always, I had my reasons, because blond and blonde are in fact two distinct words.
Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good
Adjective:
(of a person, especially a woman or child) attractive in a delicate way without being truly beautiful.
‘a pretty little girl with an engaging grin’
Adverb:
To a moderately high degree; fairly.
‘he looked pretty fit for his age’
‘it was a pretty bad injury’
Pretty is, well, a pretty interesting word. The definition that immediately comes to mind for you is probably the first one above. What really interests me about this definition is that last part: without being truly beautiful. Pretty is certainly a less powerful word than beautiful. Because of that it, like nice, feels almost like an insult to use it to describe someone. Sure, it’s technically a positive word, but when you’ve got so many other adjectives you can use, calling someone pretty feels like a deliberate choice to not use something more unambiguously complimentary.
What does the Name of your Favourite Coffee Mean?
It seems like only a few years ago, when, as chain coffee shops like Starbucks became popular, every second comedian felt compelled to joke about how coffee shops had so many crazy types of coffee.
Now though, such chains are commonplace, and we’re all quite used to the idea of being able to get a variety of coffees. Have you ever wondered though, what all those names actually mean?
English-Language Thoughts 