languages

You Dirty Rat!

Niall O'Donnell 1 Comment

No, I won’t get political. I promise. I mean yes, this post was directly inspired by the fact that it’s just been announced that the former lawyer of the current president of the United States has pleased guilty to violating campaign law at the direction of said president, which reminded me of him recently calling someone in a roughly similar position a rat on Twitter recently.

No, I won’t get political. But I do wonder why we call someone who betrays others by giving up information a rat… Continue reading →

Garage or Garage?

Niall O'Donnell 2 Comments

What voice do you read in? Whenever I read, it’s just my own voice I hear in my head, like when I’m thinking to myself. And that works fine. Most of the time, anyway, but then sometimes I’ll read something which makes this seemingly normal practice feel a bit odd. Continue reading →

Work Colleagues

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

What do you call the people you work with?

Nothing nasty I hope. Based on what I hear a lot lately, there’s a good chance you call them work colleagues. But here’s the thing:

Why not just call them colleagues? Continue reading →

On the Scent

Niall O'Donnell Leave a comment

The verb sentire in Italian is an interesting one. I’ve come across it a few times recently on Duolingo, meaning to hear. I could see how it was related to English words associated with feelings like (to) sense, sensitive, sentiment(al) etc., but found it curious that in Italian it seemed to be used only to refer to one sense. Seemed to anyway… Continue reading →

Triste!

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

I had crème brûlée for dessert this evening.

I’m not normally so decadent, but it was a special occasion, so why not have some fine French food? Continue reading →

Hello Kitty

Niall O'Donnell 17 Comments

Obviously I was joking yesterday when I said I’d write about the origins of the name Hello Kitty. But immediately I did think that I knew something interesting about the word kitten. Let me illustrate. Continue reading →

Converse

Niall O'Donnell 4 Comments

Somewhere online today, I saw an ad or article about Hello Kitty Converse shoes. It probably wasn’t a targetted ad, or else whatever cookies are tracking me don’t know me at all. Curiously, for some reason, when I saw the word Converse, I pronounced it with an emphasis on the second syllable, like it was the verb to converse. Seeing the full title and accompanying picture of course made me realise that the word was Converse, the proper noun referring to the brand name, and not the verb. This was another interesting example of the difference in word stress between nouns and verbs. And of course at this stage, I’d got to thinking: why is the shoemaker named Converse, and how is that related to the verb to converse? Continue reading →