Or if you prefer, The Day of the Dead. Which is today, because confusingly, yesterday was All Saints’ Day (AKA All Hallows’ Day). Both days are quite different though.
All Souls’ Day
thoughts on English
A Touch of Diaeresis
Can you think of an English word, not borrowed from another language, that has an accent or other diacritic? (a diacritic is simply any glyph added to a letter: see here for examples).
Riveting Stuff!
Have you ever noticed that riveting can have two meanings? It can mean fascinating, but also the action of fixing rivets (metal pins) to a surface (I was thinking about this recently after hearing someone talk about the riveters who worked on the Titanic). It might seem odd that it can have these two meanings, but if you think about it, it makes sense.
Less or Fewer?
A pretty simple one today: this is something that many people are curious about. Both are clearly similar, but what’s the difference between them?
Begging the Question
Writing about the etymology of the word clock yesterday reminded me of when I wrote about the word to decimate recently, and how people are fond of citing its original meaning as being to reduce by 10%, even though that’s not true.
As I said before, I can understand people having this misconception, and I can understand the instinct to correct people. There have always been people who’ve acted this way about language, but recently I’ve noticed more and more people taking such a prescriptive approach to English.
The Word Clock? Now that Rings a Bell…
The word clock has quite a long history, unsurprising for such a common and simple word.
How’s it Going?
How’s what going exactly? Obviously you don’t really need to think about that if someone asks you this question.
The correct answer is of course, Fine thanks, how are you? It’s just a greeting, so you don’t really need to tell the person how you are, though I sometimes do, especially if I have something interesting to tell them. Still, the question remains: how’s what going? And where?
English-Language Thoughts 