Sesquiotica

Tartuffe

Posted on January 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

The other evening I saw a splendid production at Canadian Stage of one of the great plays of the French theatre: Tartuffe, by Molière. It was in an excellent modern English version and a staging that happily and effectively made the play as current to our eyes as it had been to the eyes of its original audience in 1664. Continue reading →

Pronunciation tip: claret, Rothschild

Posted on January 18, 2019 | Leave a comment

It’s been too long since my last pronunciation tip video. Sit down with me now with a bottle of red Bordeaux (Mouton Cadet; I’m not rich) and let’s talk about how to say claret and Rothschild.

Yeet citationality: yippie-ki-yay!

Posted on January 16, 2019 | 3 comments

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

The voting is in, and the American Dialect Society’s Slang Word of the Year is… yeet.

Yeet is not so well known to oldsters, but it is in vogue among the youth. Its popularity demonstrates a central fact of how vocabulary spreads. It also leads us to Bugs Bunny, Clark Gable, and Judith Butler. Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in language and linguistics

Tagged Bugs Bunny, citationality, Editors Canada, Judith Butler, language, linguistics, yeet

Odin and Thor

Posted on January 16, 2019 | 1 comment

Odin…

…Thor

Listen to this coffice space review, complete with ambient background sound, for free on Patreon

The bottom of the heart of central Toronto is guarded on either side by two Norse gods so important each has a workday named after him: Odin and Thor. On the east side, on King by River Street, is Odin, the god who gave us hump day (Wednesday is Odin’s day, by way of another version of his name, Wotan). On the west side, on Bathurst at Niagara – two blocks south of King – is Thor, the god who gave us Thursday.

Each god is represented by an eponymous coffice space. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Coffice Space

Tagged Coffice Space, Odin, Thor

erwartungstorte

Posted on January 16, 2019 | 2 comments

Look at this word. Just look at it. You just have to love it, don’t you? It’s long. It’s German. It must mean something that English speakers wish they had a word for. Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in new old words

Tagged erwartungtorte, new old words

sprunt

Posted on January 14, 2019 | 1 comment

I was just flipping through my paperback abridgement of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, as one does on a leisurely Sunday evening, and I happened on this stub of a word: sprunt.

Well, now. What could it was? It starts with the spr that we see in spring and sprinkle and spruce and sprain and sprawl, and it ends with the unt that we see in hunt and shunt and bunt and punt and runt. The word as a whole looks like an irregular past participle of sprint – as in I sprint, I sprant, I have sprunt. There are several ways it could go. Or, of course, the meaning could be entirely unrelated to what it sounds like it means, although with two sound clusters that have vivid associations, that’s not so likely; even if it started out unrelated, the sense would tend to drift towards what people think it should mean. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged sprunt, word tasting notes

yarringle

Posted on January 12, 2019 | 1 comment

We use words to spin many a yarn. But a word, in turn, spins yarns around it: all the uses and places and users and senses it’s had, wound or twisted or balled up and ready to be ravelled for revelry or pulled piecemeal for prose. Even the way it’s balled up can be different from time to time, not always telling a true tale of where it came from, and the same word for the same meaning and function can have different shapes over time, some plain for function, some fancy for curiosity or to show ingenuity and splendour. A word is in this way a yarringle, and yarringle is such a word. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged word tasting notes, yarringle

Dineen

Posted on January 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

Isn’t it pretty? …Pretty busy

Listen to this coffice space review, complete with live ambient audio in stereo, for free on Patreon

Dineen is an easy walk from where I live. It’s right at the corner of Temperance and Yonge, occupying a site that used to have an optical dispenser whereat I bought several pairs of spectacles. I think right now I’m sitting almost exactly where I first saw the frames of the pair I’m wearing right now. (I have newer glasses, but I use the older, weaker ones for close-up work.)

I seldom work in Dineen. Continue reading →

legion

Posted on January 10, 2019 | 3 comments

“My name is Legion, for I am many.”

I first read that when I was a child. I wondered how it could make sense. For one thing, in the little town I lived in, there was only one Legion. Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged legion, word tasting notes

12 Gifts for Writers ebook

Posted on January 9, 2019 | 4 comments

As promised, I have made an ebook (in PDF) of 12 Gifts for Writers. You can download it for free, pass it around to your friends, and – I hope – gain something from it. Just click on the link:

12 Gifts for Writers (PDF, 4.2 MB)