One of the innovations of Newspeak, the version of English used by the totalitarian government in Orwell’s dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, was the elimination of antonyms. A writer at the Oxford Dictionaries site explains: By choosing which words the populace can use, The Party can choose to shift thought in a more positive or negative … Read more
A reader sent me this request: Would you please do a blast-out about the word nauseated versus nauseous? The noun “blast-out” is new to me, but I presume it means something like the following: a strongly worded admonition to English speakers to get the difference between these two words straight once and for all, blast … Read more
Since Shakespeare’s time at least, children have been portrayed as being reluctant to go to school: …the whining school-boy with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. —As You Like It, II:vii,148-150. That’s a sad fate for school, a word that originated in the context of enjoyable leisure time. Our word … Read more
A striking headline from The Daily Beast got me thinking about all the expressions that make use of the noun belt: The Rustbelt Roars Back From the Dead I thought a post about belt idioms might be especially useful to ESL speakers. A belt is a strip of flexible material, such as leather, plastic, cloth, … Read more
A reader offers this interesting use of dissembled: On CNN a state department spokesperson just referred to our soldiers having dissembled some weapons in the hands of Iraqis. If what the soldiers did to the weapons was take them apart, then the word the spokesperson wanted was disassembled. If the soldiers were disguising the weapons … Read more
A reader wonders about the verbs garnish and garnishee: I have been hearing a radio commercial that mentions how the IRS can “garnish one’s wages.” I always thought garnish referred to decorating food or something, but when I looked this up online, apparently garnishee is the word that has fallen out of use, and garnish … Read more
A reader wonders if there is a significant difference of connotation between the verbs “to note” and “to notice.” The question arose as he tried to decide between the following sentences to express the inner dialogue of a character: Rory noted that the CEO never asked for details. Rory noticed that the CEO never asked … Read more
We all know that spell checkers aren’t much help in catching homonyms. English speakers are still expected to discern the difference between pear, pare, and pair by drawing on what they should have learned in school. Some words, however, have no sound-alikes. Spell checkers do a great job of flagging one-of-a-kind words like tragedy, definitely, … Read more
In response to my post about the use of the word unctuous in the context of cooking, several readers suggested that speakers might be confusing unctuous with sumptuous. If they are, they must not know the meaning of sumptuous. English-speaking cooks who use unctuous to describe pork roasts are referring to taste, texture, and juiciness. … Read more
More than one reader has chided me for writing “comprised of” in a recent post. Here’s the culprit: In the ancient Roman army, a centurion was the officer in charge of a century, a unit originally comprised of 100 men. Anyone who has ever read a popular language blog has seen this dictum stated as … Read more
If you understand the meaning of etymon and lemma in the two following statements, you may want to skip this post: Papyrus is the etymon of paper. An etymological dictionary gives the etymons or etymologies of its lemmas. An etymon is the antecedent form of a word. It’s the word or any of the separate … Read more
A reader brought the following quotation from a statement by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) to my attention: Among the five stores was the Pico Rivera, California Walmart Supercenter, which has been [a] hotbed for worker action. The store is also of symbolic important to the low-wage worker movement… I assumed that the … Read more