Sesquiotica

daubry

Posted on April 23, 2019 | 4 comments

Is this word good or not?

I guess it depends on who you ask. Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged daubery, daubry, word tasting notes

fryke

Posted on April 21, 2019 | 1 comment

It’s time for another fresh old word from James Orchard Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic Words. And it’s a word for spring.

In fact, it’s a word for springing, For sproinging. Even for spronging. It’s for someone or something who’s spring-fresh, even frightfully so, like the friskiest fry or some other friendly tyke. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged frike, fryke, word tasting notes

spurk

Posted on April 18, 2019 | 3 comments

Spring is here, and everything is spurking up.

Does spurk seem like a word I just invented? It… sort of is, but it’s not. I wondered if it existed, so I looked, and it does. It has been in English for more than three centuries, though no one seems to use it these days.

And what would you suppose it means? Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged spurk, word tasting notes

circumsult

Posted on April 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

We all know the result of an insult. If you jump at someone, you get push-back. Which, as it happens, is etymologically correct: the sult in both words comes from Latin saltare, ‘leap’. The re means ‘back’ (as in what springs back at you after you push); the in means ‘in’ or ‘into’ or ‘towards’ or ‘at’ – if you jump down someone’s throat, that’s covered etymologically by insult too, though in English idiom jumping down someone’s throat is usually going a little farther than just insulting them.

So what do we do if we want to diss someone without getting blowback? How do we cast shade without getting chopped down? We can dance around it. Or, more to the point, we can jump around. Continue reading →

flinder

Posted on April 16, 2019 | 1 comment

What are they flutter among the flowers and among the cinders? Flinders. Do they flit towards the flames in fascination? Or flap between blossoms and flowing bowers? Are they grey as dust and smoke? Or vivid, resplendent, variegated, as monarchs and iridescent metalmarks? All are leaping and dropping lepidoptera, each one a flinder. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged flinder, flinders, word tasting notes

A Hidden Gender?

Posted on April 13, 2019 | 5 comments

Last fall I gave at talk for Editors Canada in Barrie, Ontario, on grammatical gender and pronouns. I forgot to add it to my blog then, so I’m adding it now! There are many people who have a lot of things to say about grammatical gender and natural gender and use of different pronouns for different people, and many of them are presenting “facts” that are no such thing. So I took the time to set forth the real facts.

5 Comments

Posted in language and linguistics

Tagged gender, grammar, language, pronouns, sex, they, video

Digital enhancement for numbers (Go figures!)

Posted on April 12, 2019 | 3 comments

This article was originally published on The Editors’ Weekly, the blog of Editors Canada

At the ACES conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in late March, the Associated Press announced changes to their recommendations for handling numbers and debated some others.

About sixty percent of those present gasped when one of the recommendations was made – in fact, it might have been 70 percent. No, I’m going with 80% of those in attendance. But it made perfect sense to me. Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in editing

Tagged ACES conference, AP style, Associated Press, Editors Canada, James Harbeck, Linguistics Frankly, numbers, readability, speech sounds, style, style guides, The Editors' Weekly

Tandem

Posted on April 11, 2019 | Leave a comment

It’s clean but… eclectic

Listen to the audio of this in tandem with the text and images

I’m sitting on some old crocheted thing provided to pad butts that have planted on the plywood here. Plywood is the theme of Tandem, in tandem with bare brick. There’s a bit of bench and counter at front, near the window, but most of the seating is at six square plywood tables arranged in front of two plywood benches along the side walls of the back. The tables also have one cheap chair each, of the kind found in underfunded schools and community centres: formed plywood on metal frames. Continue reading →

pickering

Posted on April 9, 2019 | 1 comment

According to Slanguage: A Dictionary of Irish Slang, by Bernard Share, pickering – in colloquial Irish English – means “Expressing amorous interest in.” Sort of like hankering, I guess, but more… picky? Peckish? Share doesn’t give an etymology.

But it puts me in mind of a story. Not an Irish one, a Northern English one, but anyway.

There was this king. I don’t know which one, but he was in Northern England for some reason, Yorkshire to be precise, North Yorkshire to be preciser, Ryedale to be preciserer. Anyway, he had a fancy. Probably he had more than one fancy, but he had a fancy ring, that’s for sure, and he lost track of it. It came off his finger, as rings may, depending on what you’re doing.

So he blamed a local maiden. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged pickering, word tasting notes

haberdasher

Posted on April 5, 2019 | 1 comment

Harry S Truman was once a haberdasher.

So I learned from a book in my childhood. The president with the ornamental S snaking in the middle of his name like a cloth measuring tape was once a purveyor of gentlemen’s sartorial quincaillerie: bespoke four-in-hands, cufflink-and-button sets, collar studs, cut-to-measure bowties, and perhaps seersucker, gabardine, and herringbone suits. All the items, in short, for a well-turned-out gentleman in the Kansas City of 1920. And then a recession hit and his store folded like a silk pocket square. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged haberdasher, haberdashery, word tasting notes