A word that may seem old hat but perhaps also counfounds the hearer. Those who don’t know what a trilby is may think it a trifling, silly, or flimsy frill, or perhaps a flower – or a furry little purring space rabbit. Those who know it is a hat may be misled by the tri to think it a three-cornered one. In truth, the hat could have been called a Du Maurier hat (for the man who wrote the novel Trilby and did the illustrations, including ones of a character wearing a floppy Homburg-type hat with a pinched front, which was subsequently worn in the hit play as well), or a Billee hat (for the character who wore the hat)… or perhaps even a Svengali hat (for the most famous character of the novel, who, however, would more likely have lent his name to an axe-like beard had his appearance been more remarked than his character). But this is a word tasting note, not a hat tasting note. And, in truth, the word could have more readily been given to the feet, as the heroine Trilby had beautiful ones – and in fact it for a time was a cute word for a foot – or to a style of shoes – which it also was for a time. It never referred to a singing voice, oddly, in spite of its thrilling treble trill. The word on the page is mostly ascenders, going up like the heroine’s voice or the hairs on the back of your neck on hearing it (or on thinking of Svengali’s Mesmeric control), or pointing to the hat, but with a little y setting down a dainty foot at the end – or curving and pointing down like Svengali’s beard, depending on how you see it.
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- 366 Days of Words in Science What this is: 1 photo + 1 word x 366 days. 0 rules.
- Affixes: the building blocks of English Michael Quinion’s site based on his book Ologies and Isms.
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- Corpus of Contemporary American English 385 million words of contemporary American English texts, searchable for finding frequency, collocations, syntactic roles, etc.
- Dialect Blog The accents of English
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- Evopropinquitous A compendium of knowledge gleaned from seemingly endless scholarly pursuits in the wild. (Or: Things I learned as a field biologist.)
- Google Ngram Viewer Graph relative frequency of words over time in Google’s digitized books.
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- Motivated Grammar Prescriptivism Must Die!
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- Popular Linguistics Magazine The monthly online magazine that brings language- and linguistics-focused stories and research to the masses.
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- Ten minutes past deadline Sub-editing when the clock’s run out but the copy hasn’t. By Ed Latham.
- The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows A wistful, mournful, fanciful lexicon.
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- The Lexicographer's Rules The personal weblog of Grant Barrett, editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, a collection of words from the fringes of English.
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- wordcount.org A ranking by frequency of 86,800 words of British English.
- Wordorigins.org A good site about the origins of words and phrases
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- Wordsmoker because words are highly addictive too
- World Wide Words An excellent place to look for reliable information on the origins and uses of words and phrases.
- You Don't Say Veteran drudge John E. McIntyre writes about language, usage, journalism & arbitrarily chosen subjects.
- You Don't Say John McIntyre, whom James Wolcott calls “the Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing,” writes on language, editing, journalism, and other manifestations of human frailty.
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