Imagine, completely hypothetically, that the President of Russia had information he could use to blackmail the President of the United States. Crazy, I know, but reading about this possibility recently made me think about the word blackmail. Continue reading
Not the most complicated of creatures, jellyfish. And not the most complicated of words either.
Jelly + fish = jellyfish. Easy. I heard the word during a song this evening, and was struck by its simplicity. But of course I had the feeling that there’d be something interesting, linguistically, about jellyfish.
And so I found myself on the Wikipedia entry for jellyfish. And that was just the beginning… Continue reading
This is another of those classic American/British English differences. Shop is British English, and store is American English. Pretty well known, and nothing too confusing. They both come from slightly different origins, but came fairly logically to mean the same thing. Continue reading
I was rooting through my George Orwell books this weekend, and realised that it had been a long time since I read his account of of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and grabbed it. It was only today at work when I questioned whether the title was a strange one.
Was it A Homage to Catalonia?
Or An Homage to Catalonia?
A minor difference, perhaps, but also perhaps all the difference in the world. Continue reading
Speaking, as I was yesterday, of remakes and adapatations, I see there’s another Robin Hood film out at the moment. Continue reading
Have you ever been to a housewarming party? Continue reading
You might have heard of the Ig Nobel Prize: an annual award for trivial or unusual scientific research. The name of course is a play on both the Nobel Prize and the word ignoble. I read something about the Ig Nobel Prize today, and then thought about the word ignoble, specifically:
Ignoble? That’s weird, isn’t it? Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 