What’s in a name?
These days, it’s likely to be four letters: American names are shrinking. The two most popular names in the US for baby boys in 2017 were Liam and Noah; for girls, Emma and Ava were two of the three most … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Language and grammar
In the competition to see who can be most hateful towards Republicans…
…without actually doing them physical harm (that’s a different competition), Google executive David Hogue is going for the gold. I’m not going to reproduce what he wrote; it’s just too hateful. Follow the link and you’ll get the picture. I … Continue reading →
The politics of reporting on left-wing violence against the right
Senator Rand Paul has had a rough couple of years of it. He was present but not injured when Steve Scalise was almost murdered on the baseball field by a Republican-hating shooter. And Paul had his very own incident of … Continue reading →
Watch the trap being set for Ford by Mitchell
I am heartily sick of Christine Blasey Ford, and I hope her three weeks of fame is now over or will be over very very very soon, and she will return to the obscurity she professes to crave. Whatever happens, … Continue reading →
And now, finally, we get answers to the burning questions of our time
See this: The guy who created the Devil’s Triangle drinking game calls himself the “founder” of it in the yearbook, and a guy going to different college than Kavanaugh sent a sworn letter to the FBI states that Kavanaugh’s friend … Continue reading →
The left and the double bind: setting a new standard for chutzpah
Yiddish is a language that has a lot of words that express personality qualities and types, particularly loser types or mean types or conniving types. These words often combine humor with rueful sarcasm and cynical realism about the vagaries of … Continue reading →
67 million in the US don’t speak English at home
This statistic rates a big headline at Drudge today: Nearly half of the residents in the nation’s five biggest cities do not speak English at home, choosing instead their native language, according to the latest Census Bureau data that details … Continue reading →
Undereye concealer in 29 languages
I bought a new stick of my favorite undereye circle concealer yesterday, Benefit Boi ing Hydrating Concealer. It’s pricey, but it’s one of the few that don’t emphasize all the lines and crevices by sinking into and highlighting them, and … Continue reading →
How can “dog” be considered a racial insult?
The word “dog” is not (and as far as I know, never has been) a racially-tinged epithet, although the WaPo would have you think it is: The president of the United States had just lobbed another racially charged insult — … Continue reading →
Do you say “ummm…” too much?
When I did the Sanity Squad podcasts, I couldn’t help noticing how often I said “ummm…” while trying to frame my thoughts and articulate them. Too often for my taste, although some of the feedback I got from listeners was … Continue reading →
Old tech stuff and new tech stuff
There are a few glitches on the blog that I hope will be ironed out in the next few days. You may or may not have noticed them (some are very minor, fortunately). One involves the strange disappearance of that … Continue reading →
Talking to doctors about pain
Here’s an article at NPR that gives advice on talking to doctors about pain. It questions the usefulness of the old tried-and-true 1-10 pain scale and comes down in favor of more descriptive words. It’s not that I disagree entirely; … Continue reading →