I was reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles the other day when at one point, a character described the eponymous heroine as “a crummy girl.” As with many of Hardy’s novels, which are full of 19th-century English West-Country dialect, there was an explanatory note. I was going to pass over it, as there are many such notes, and I don’t want to interrupt my reading flow by stopping for each one. Plus, the meaning was pretty clear from the context: it obviously meant attractive.
I used the expression for good recently, in the standard way, meaning forever. And then I thought: why do we use for good in this way? Continue reading
I can’t say I’ve ever spent a lot of time thinking about the term still life. I do know that at least once I had thought about the incongruity of the term though. Continue reading
John Doe, caucasian, approximately 45 years old, evidence of blunt-force trauma to the base of the skull…
Pretty familiar if you’ve been exposed to the barest minimum of American crime fiction: “John” and “Jane Doe” used to refer to an unidentified victim or suspect in a criminal case. But why these names in particular? Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about my watch a lot lately. Well, maybe not a lot, exactly, but more than normal.
You see, my watch has recently started losing some of its batons. Continue reading
I was reading an Italian short story the other day (in an edition with English translations on the right-hand page) when I saw an interesting word: la persiana. Continue reading
I was reading a novel recently in which a character speaks a language which doesn’t have the concept of the first and second person, basically no concept of I (or me) and you. As a result of this, the character himself cannot conceive of these concepts. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 