thoughts about language

When Do I Put Full Stops Inside Parentheses?

Niall O'Donnell 2 Comments

Good question, and one I’ve been asking myself a lot while I’ve been writing lately.

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I Haven’t Got the Stomach for It

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After writing yesterday about how the word revolting comes from the stomach (not literally: that’d be, well, revolting), I was thinking about just how much of a role that organ plays in the English language.

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The Peasants are Revolting

Niall O'Donnell 2 Comments

An easy joke, that one there in the title. But have you ever wondered why revolting has two such distinct meanings which let us make the joke in the first place?

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Quite Appealing

Niall O'Donnell 2 Comments

I thought about one of those odd little cases in English of a word having two very common but seemingly quite different meanings. I was watching something in which someone convicted of a crime mentioned making an appeal, when I wondered: why can we also say that something is appealing to us?

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The Beauty of a Circle

Niall O'Donnell 12 Comments

While I was running this evening, and my mind was wandering, I thought about the phrase a nice round number. I wondered to myself why we call them round numbers. And then almost straight away I answered my own question and said that it’s obviously because of the zero. Which is round. And round numbers always end in a zero.

Well, that’s that. Sometimes the answer is just that simple, and I’m even able to figure it out myself. Not that that stopped me thinking about numbers, and roundness of course.

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