Book of Days: asher553

Oddities of the hard and soft G.

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 16:11:58 GMT

A grubby rowboat is a dingy dinghy.
If you scorch something while carrying a tune, you are singeing while singing.
I'm pretty sure "margarine" is the only word in American English where the G sounds like J before A.
But if you run afoul of the law in London, you might end up in gaol.

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Skyscrapers and tenements.

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 01:53:54 GMT

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, a tall urban office building was called a "skyscraper". I think I remember reading somewhere that the term originated with the advent of steel-reinforced construction techniques, which made buildings taller than about 4 stories feasible for the first time. My copy of the Oxford English Dictionary records the word as first being used in the 1880s in connection with Chicago. I don't remember hearing the word used much after about the 1970s, though, I suppose because such buildings had become so commonplace that they no longer needed a special name. In the 1980s I think the term "high-rise" became fashionable for both office and apartment buildings, and nowadays I don't even hear that term much anymore. Is the Burj Khalifa a skyscraper? A high-rise? Or just a very tall building in a world full of tall buildings?

When I was a kid, a "tenement" meant an apartment building, but not just any apartment building; it had a very specific connotation when I heard adults use it. A tenement was a run-down building in a bad part of town, probably with graffiti and broken windows and a drug dealer on the corner. My OED, which is generally pretty good with Americanisms, doesn't capture this particular usage of the word (although it does differentiate between the English and Scottish meanings of the term). But my 1981 American Heritage Dictionary captures it exactly: "a run-down low-rental aprtment or rooming house whose facilities and maintenance barely meet minimum standards". I don't know if the word is still used, with the same connotations, today. (Or maybe it's a regional thing: I grew up in New England, but I've lived on the West Coast all my adult life.)

Apart from things that actually became obsolete, or ephemeral slang expressions, what other words or phrases have fallen out of usage in your lifetime?

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Time flies like an arrow ...

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 20:12:52 GMT

Good writing captures a feeling. Sometimes, in our daily experience of life, time seems to pass very slowly. At other times, it seems years pass in the wink of an eye. Effective narrative prose is written in a style that captures the same feeling and makes it immediate. For example:

"I lay down for a nap, I fell asleep, I woke up, it was 20 years later, everything in the world had changed ..."

This technique is known as a coma splice.

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Scotland!

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 21:05:46 GMT

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/04/500-year-old-manuscript-contains-earliest-known-use-of-the-f-word/

F**k yeah!

Via Andrew Ducker.

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Asking the Hard Questions

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 23:20:15 GMT

Via an academic friend who wishes to remain anonymous:

'From ******** University's "Diversity of Human Experience" requirement guidelines: "In this scoring guide, 'diversity' refers to differences in ethnic, religious, and cultural perspectives, class, race, gender, age, sexual orientation and ability."

This term I had my students critique the university's stated educational requirements (alongside C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man). When we got to this sentence one student asked: "Is it just me, or would an Oxford comma be helpful here?"'

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Observation

Tue, 02 May 2017 02:47:41 GMT

"Sea salt" and "evaporated cane juice" are the health food industry's version of Don Draper's "toasted".

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