Learning English as an adult and the spelling is the part that still defeats me. Through, though, thought, tough, thorough. Knight with a silent k and a gh doing nothing. Colonel pronounced with an r that is not there.…
Trying to explain this dish to family in the UK and failing repeatedly. "Biscuit" in British English is a hard sweet thing you dunk in tea. "Gravy" is the brown meat sauce you put on a roast. So the American dish,…
Methane has one carbon, ethane has two. The names differ by a single letter at the front, and that letter is doing an enormous amount of work for something so small. It seems too tidy to be an accident, but I also…
Looking for the right term and finding that everything I reach for means something slightly different. The thing I am describing: an application that takes hundreds of megabytes to do something simple, uses a lot of…
Teaching materials state that English is not a tonal language, on the grounds that pitch changes within a word do not change its meaning, and that English uses pitch patterns to convey attitude instead. That distinction…
I was writing something and wanted an adjective for a man with very firm moral principles, and could not find one. I ended up rewriting the sentence to avoid the gap. I know the obvious candidates and none of them quite…
I have now been corrected at three separate dinners on posh, on golf, and on the whole nine yards, and I am starting to suspect the good stories are false at a rate close to a hundred percent. There seems to be a…
The phrase has a comma before the last word, and I have seen it read two ways. One reading takes it as a form of address the instruction is "keep it simple" and the person being instructed is being called stupid. The…
Carbon monoxide. Not carbon monooxide: the doubled vowel gets collapsed and everyone writes and says it with one o. But the same collision happens in diiodine, with two i's in a row, and there the vowels stay. Nobody…
My eight year old asked what the nap in kidnap means and I had absolutely nothing. It clearly isn't sleeping. Then she asked whether napkin is the same nap, which felt like a reasonable guess and I suspect is a…
I edit legal adjacent copy and our house style says v for case names but vs. in sports and marketing, with no explanation offered. My Latin dictionary gives versus as a participle of vertere, to turn, which does not…
I looked up a slang term I've heard my whole life and the dictionary gave a first citation in the 1920s, which is clearly much later than it must have existed. Then I noticed the same gap on several other entries. Is…
Someone at work stated flatly that rule of thumb comes from an old law permitting a man to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb, and that everyone should stop using the phrase. It gets repeated a lot but…
I have been burned twice by cheerful word origin books that repeat the acronym stories with a straight face. Someone recommended Anatoly Liberman's Word Origins and How We Know Them and I cannot tell from the blurb…
The version I've heard three times now is that Roman sculptors filled cracks in marble with wax, so honest work was sine cera, without wax, and that gave us sincere. It's a lovely story and it has the shape of something…
I've fallen down a hole on this one. Depending on where I look, OK is a joke abbreviation from 1830s Boston, a Choctaw word, a West African import, or a shortening of a Scots phrase, and each source states its version…