You know you’ve got problems when you’re flicking through a jewellery catalogue and your eye homes in on the etymology tidbits rather than the diamonds. The tidbit in question comes from the Hamilton and Inches catalogue: The word “carat” when applied to gemstones is a unit of weight. It is a distortion of “carob”: the …
Category archives: English
A translation sin of omission
I wrote a couple of posts, back in August, about the Oxford comma (Oxford commas (1), The Oxford Comma dilemma: a solution? and Oxford commas (2): Live dangerously – take our poll!). This post too is about “list” sentences containing commas. It’s also about a way of spotting when an Italian-to-English translator is working on …
And sometimes words are just soooo interesting!
I’ve just been reading Khoi Vinh’s marvellous blog, Subtraction. In his post on “Ways I’m a Dork: Travel Edition” he describes the Grid-It Organizer from Cocoon. The Grid-It holds “all the paraphernalia — cables, remotes, pens, dongles, adapters, etc.” that most of us now need to pack for work trips (and probably holidays too). The …
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Words
This lovely video, produced by Everynone for Radiolab, has been doing the rounds on Twitter, so you may already have seen it. It bears repeat viewing, I think. It’s about words and also about our common humanity. I find it moving. Serendipity is a lovely word and a lovely concept. Shortly after watching the Words …
Commas: fascinating facts (and a Stop Press)
Fascinating comma fact 1 A comma is not just a punctuation mark, it’s also a type of butterfly, so-named because of the white comma-shaped marking on the underside of its wing (you can just about see it in the photo). UK Butterflies (which provides more detailed photos) describes the Comma as looking like a “tatty …
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The Oxford Comma dilemma: a solution?
To those of you still fretting over the Oxford Comma dilemma (and who don’t read the Comments – tsk, tsk!), the “august journal” Speculative Grammarian offers the following solution: Since the OC appears to present more problems of CrossPondian translation than any other form of punctuation, a solution must be found which satisfies users on both …
Oxford commas (2): Live dangerously – take our poll!
Do you use the Oxford (serial) comma? Here’s a sentence with the Oxford comma: My favourite foods are Greek yoghurt, salted almonds, cheese, and dark chocolate. Here’s the same sentence without: My favourite foods are Greek yoghurt, salted almonds, cheese and dark chocolate. And here’s one where, unless you change the order of the list …
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Oxford commas (1)
I was puzzled last week to see references on Twitter to the exotic-sounding “Oxford comma”, a new term to me. It turns out (thank you, Mark Allen and Oxford Dictionaries) that the Oxford comma is another name for the “serial comma”: an optional comma before the word ‘and’ at the end of a list: We …
If the shoe doesn’t fit (2): eggcorns and etymology
“Shoe-in”, Ben Zimmer points out, belongs to a special family of errors called “eggcorns”: misspellings, mis-hearings or misinterpretations of standard (often idiomatic) words or sayings. Their name itself derives from a misspelling of “acorn”. As Ben explains in Shifting Idioms: An Eggcornucopia, eggcorns might eventually reach folk-etymological permanence, or they might continue to be considered nonstandard …
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If the shoe doesn’t fit: getting the etymology right
Ben Zimmer’s latest On Language column in the New York Times (Beach-Blanket Lingo, 5 August 2010) examines the terms used by coastal resort residents (from-heres) to describe summer visitors (come-heres). One term used for the latter is shoobies, explained thus by John T. Cunningham, writing in 1958: day-trippers from Philly took advantage of the $1 round-trip …
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