Not the most complicated of creatures, jellyfish. And not the most complicated of words either.
Jelly + fish = jellyfish. Easy. I heard the word during a song this evening, and was struck by its simplicity. But of course I had the feeling that there’d be something interesting, linguistically, about jellyfish.
And so I found myself on the Wikipedia entry for jellyfish. And that was just the beginning… Continue reading
This is another of those classic American/British English differences. Shop is British English, and store is American English. Pretty well known, and nothing too confusing. They both come from slightly different origins, but came fairly logically to mean the same thing. Continue reading
Have you ever been to a housewarming party? Continue reading
You might have heard of the Ig Nobel Prize: an annual award for trivial or unusual scientific research. The name of course is a play on both the Nobel Prize and the word ignoble. I read something about the Ig Nobel Prize today, and then thought about the word ignoble, specifically:
Ignoble? That’s weird, isn’t it? Continue reading
It’s the epitome of surfer-dude slang: totally gnarly dude!
Thinking about the word today though, it seemed a strange fit for surfing slang. Surely, I thought, it’s related to gnarled, as in knobbly, rough, or twisted. Not how you’d describe a wave really, is it? Continue reading
I’m writing this from a hotel room. The word hotel can be traced back to the Old French word ostel, which of course is also the origin of the word hostel. And, it might surprise you, hospital. Continue reading
I had another of my common hmmm, I wonder why… moments while writing yesterday’s post, specifically when mentioning the meaning of dead ringer. I understand that dead meant precise in that context, but I wondered why we use it with that meaning? Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 