“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-
Why looks’t thou so?”-With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
This is one of the more unusual English idioms. It means a very heavy, psychological burden.
But why an albatross?
…is good for the gander.
A gander of course, being a male goose. And what’s the term for a female goose?
Continuing a vague theme about gender in language, I want to look a little at the few gendered words we have in English.
I mentioned recently that actor/actress is still a distinction we often make. There’s waiter/waitress too. And that’s basically it.
There are some specifically female forms that have relatively recently fallen out of favour. Stewardess and manageress, for example. Generally though, we’ve been content to use gender-neutral terms.
Today is 11 November, Armistice Day, on which we commemorate the end of the First World War. Or, World War I. That’s how we refer to the conflict now, but it’s actually had surprisingly many names.
…brevity is the soul of wit… – William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Twitter again. Now we can compose tweets of 280 characters on Twitter, double the previous limit. And I have to ask: why?
You may have heard of the Paradise Papers, which have revealed some of the figure financial dealings of the super-rich. Reading about them is interesting because of how careful the better journalists are with their use of language. Because, a single misused word can make a big difference.
Well, it depends, doesn’t it?
Even if you’ve never thought about it before, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the word into is a combination of the words in and to. If you think about any sentence in which you might use the word, it clearly combines the meaning of both:
He walked into the room.
To is there because there’s movement, and to usually comes after verbs of movement. In is there because he ends up in the room. Easy. But, does this mean we can always replace in to with into?
English-Language Thoughts 