Are you into vintage clothes, or perhaps accessories? Maybe, if you can afford it, you have a vintage-car collection. The meaning of the word vintage is fairly straightforward. It basically means old, or old–fashioned, but also stylish and of good quality. It’s also an interesting, and straightforward, word in an etymological sense.
Writing about the four humours yesterday, something struck me: the word humorous isn’t really very humorous.
There may be one advantage to Donald Trump being President of the United States (only one!), though it’s quite a selfish one: he certainly gives me a lot of food for thought. Sometimes I really don’t want to write about him, or even think about him, or exist in the same universe as him, but he can be hard to ignore, particularly when he demonstrates his unusually dysfunctional relationship with the English language.
Last week he gave us another addition to the evergrowing list of did-he-actually-just-say-that? moments:
I think it’s only fair, after looking at the way the French language uses pseudo-anglicisms (a lovely term I came across earlier), it’s only fair that I take a corresponding look at foreign words we use in English, and how their use is different from in their original language. Unsurprisingly, we use a lot of foreign terms, and with most English speakers being monolingual, we don’t always use them as they were originally intended.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
-Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), Blade Runner (1982)
I should state right away that this post has nothing to do with Blade Runner, either of the 2019 or 2049 variety (though I did rewatch the former last weekend in preparation for watching the latter, probably this afternoon). Continue reading
Kerning refers to the process of adjusting the space between letters in typesetting and graphic design.
The word originally comes from the French carne, meaning projecting angle or quill of a pen. In the days of manual typesetting, letters were placed on individual metal blocks known as glyphs. If a letter overlapped the following letter (e.g. a capital T before a capital A), the overlapping parts (the bars of the T), would protrude over the edge of the glyph, and these exposed parts of the letter were known as kerns.
You might not think kerning is important, especially because most digital text is automatically kerned for your pleasure. Here’s a nice example from Wikipedia of the benefits of kerning:
English-Language Thoughts 