Good question, and one I’ve been asking myself a lot while I’ve been writing lately.
Continue readingWhen Do I Put Full Stops Inside Parentheses?
thoughts about language
I Haven’t Got the Stomach for It
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.
Continue readingThe Peasants are Revolting
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?
Continue readingQuite Appealing
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?
Continue readingThe Beauty of a Circle
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.
English-Language Thoughts 