When I was young, I was often curious when characters on American TV would occasionally mention cursive. I could never figure out what they meant, and it was mentioned rarely enough that I never really got enough context to figure it out. It also sounded quite strange as it sounded so much like the word curse (and a joke in a classic Simpsons episode is based on this resemblance).
A red-letter day is a day of special significance for some reason or another. Why do we call it a red-letter day?
… and they’ll take a mile. Or, how about…
Give someone a centimetre, and they’ll take a kilometre.
Only one of these is an actual phrase in English, but it doesn’t make reference to the system of measurement in use in every country except three.
It was St. Patrick’s Day yesterday (two days ago, at least, by the time you get to read this), so I suppose it’s as good a time as any to look at a few of the words that have come from the Irish language, though I’ve looked at some before.
Score is another of those very common words that have a surprising number of different uses. The most obvious use is as a verb in sport: you can score a goal or a point, for example. Of course it can also be a noun in terms of sport, such as in What’s the score? Less frequently though, we also encounter score to refer to the music from a film or television programme, and as verb meaning to cut or scratch a line on a surface. And a score can mean twenty. Despite all these different meanings though, each use of the word actually shares the same origin.
Another day, another Trump tweet, another nugget of stupidity. As if the Space Force Saturday-morning cartoon wasn’t enough, he then misspelled Marine Corps as Marine Core. At least though, it’s a somewhat understandable misspelling, the words sound the same, and in meaning the words corps and core are similar in a way.
No political commentary needed, I think: space force says it all, doesn’t it? (unless you’re reading this in the future, in which case this is what I’m talking about)
English-Language Thoughts 