A noun that sounds rather like a sandbag hitting gravel, or a fisticuff in a scuffle, or your dad’s hand whacking the side of your head for your part in the kerfuffle. Or like the half-stifled cough you make after inhaling a bit of sawdust, which is closer to the meaning. It has a variety of resonances: curve, kerchief, cuff, carafe, kerb, even mirror suggestions of freak and maybe firkin. There’s that rough-and ready k with its notch, and on the other end the two bent-over letters, rf, like wheat stalks in a crop circle. One might even discern a trough down the middle, cut out between the k and the f down to the tops of the e and r. If that trough were a notch made by a circular saw, say, then it would be a kerf. Kerf can also refer to the cut end of a tree or branch, or even the bit that was cut off. Or should I say carved off… since carve is not only another resonance for this word but in fact a close cousin. Kerf comes from Old English cyrf, which comes from an ablaut version (thus probably a past-tense form) of the stem that also produced ceorfan, now known to us as carve. So they are cut from the same branch! But where carve starts with a curve, kerf has the straight cut. And what word comes most often before this one? That toothy saw.
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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.
- Angry Sub-Editor Patrick Neylan, Eeditor of business reports. Permanently angry about the abuse of English, maths and logic. Terms and conditions: by reading this blog you accept that all opinions expressed herein will henceforth be your opinions.
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- Constellations of Words Explore the etymology and symbolism of the constellations
- 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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- Ten minutes past deadline Sub-editing when the clock’s run out but the copy hasn’t. By Ed Latham.
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- wordcount.org A ranking by frequency of 86,800 words of British English.
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- 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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