languages

What Makes a Superhero Super?

Niall O'Donnell 9 Comments

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.

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Holding out for a Hero

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

When writing about James Joyce last month, I got to thinking about the word hero. Two things made me think about it: the fact that an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was known as Stephen Hero, and how often I referred to Leopold Bloom as the hero of the novel Ulysses.

On the surface, it seems like a fairly straightforward word. You can think of its meaning pretty easily, I’m sure: someone brave, with exceptional abilities. Someone we can look up to. And this has always been the meaning of the word. It comes from the Greek ἥρως (hērōs), meaning protector or defender, and was often specifically used in Ancient Greek myths to refer to heroes of divine ancestry such as Heracles. So, not so different from how we use it today. Except, as I alluded to in the first paragraph, when we use it as a literary term.

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I’ll Learn you Good!

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

Isn’t that just the classic signifier or a stupid, or at least uneducated, person? How could they possibly confuse these two antonyms? And of course this mistake is especially ironic as it’s related to education and learning. However, if you’re the type of person who likes to make themselves feel smarter by noting how people make this mistake but you don’t, perhaps you need to rethink how wrong these people actually are.

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Happy Belgian National Day!

Niall O'Donnell 23 Comments

Exactly one week after Bastille Day, it’s the Belgian National Holiday!

Yay!

Ok, so you probably weren’t aware of that fact. The holiday hasn’t really entered the public consciousness the way Bastille Day, or other national holidays like St. Patrick’s Day or the Fourth of July have. And I think that’s mainly because Belgium is a small country that doesn’t have such a distinctive national identity compared to other countries. And I think that in turn has a lot of to do with the fact that it’s a complex little country, linguistically.

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I React to: YouTube English!!

Niall O'Donnell 10 Comments

Earlier this afternoon, on my lunch break, I came upon the following article: “21 Insane Ways Celebrities Get (and Stay) Rich.” I can’t really recommend it. Some of the items are mildly interesting, but could hardly be described as insane, unless you consider selling a business at a profit insane. I did find one thing curious though, and that was the following sentence about Jake Paul, who is apparently a YouTube star:

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She Could Steal, but she Could not Rob

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

It was a lovely sunny evening in the west of Ireland today, which made me feel like Abbey Road would be a good accompaniment to my walk home. Probably because it features “Here Comes the Sun,” but I think it’s a generally positive album anyway, suitable for a balmy evening. As I was listening, I was struck by a line in “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” which I’d heard many times before, but never really thought much about:

She could steal, but she could not rob.

It’s a clever, cute line, and if you’re interested in the possible meaning behind it, you can look here. This evening though, it made me think about the difference between those two verbs: steal and rob.

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“Fill in” or “Fill out?”

QuoteNiall O'Donnell 12 Comments

Thinking yesterday about the question of whether or not we can use in and out together, and about phrasal verbs, made me think of something else. Have you ever noticed that fill in and fill out mean the same thing?

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