There she goes, my beautiful world
Words I had to look up
Yes, you guessed it. This is the singular of agenda. And yes, its use is somewhat archaic. OED calls it «now rare» and Chambers doesn’t list it at all. Agenda’s modern usage is clearly singular; one looks at the agenda before beginning a meeting, and someone promoting political views is said to have an agenda.
But it is at least useful to understand agenda as a list, as opposed to simply «that which someone wants done». It’s a list, … Read the rest
I hate being wrong. Probably no one likes it very much. I know that being wrong is part of the scientific process and that many scientists delight in being wrong. I can relate to that. I tend to love new discoveries. But new discoveries also tend to be something I’ve intentionally questioned, perhaps even knew I did not know. I get frustrated when I discover that something I was absolutely certain was true simply is not so.
In the case of … Read the rest
A friend on Facebook recently asked why anyone would use bespoke when custom is a perfectly good word. The post sparked a flurry of responses about the faddish use of bespoke and its use to put on airs. I was reminded me that I looked up bespoke in the dictionary less than a year ago. My too-infrequently followed rule here is to write an entry when I look a word up in the dictionary, so I am responding here.
I looked
Another word found in Go Set a Watchman. It usually says good things about a novel when I have to look up multiple words in one sitting. Not always; sometimes it seems like the obscure words don’t add value. I have mixed feelings about the use of gulosity here. If I were asked to edit this I might not insist it get replaced but I’d want to have a conversation about why it was important. Perhaps it’s archaic, but
Found in Harper Lee’s *Go Set a Watchman*. I don’t want to go in to the context here, but I was almost sorry I looked this one up.… Read the rest
Found in the 25 January 2014 edition of *The Economist*. The former military dictator of Pakistan, Perez Musharraf, was described by doctors as being in «pretty good fettle» despite claims of a heart attack for which there was no evidence, and upon which his lawyers claimed he was not healthy enough to be tried for high treason.
Thanks go to *The Economist* for expanding my vocabulary, a task other publications seem reluctant to take on. … Read the rest
I came across this in the first paragraph of an old post and cringed. First, «complete and utter» seems redundant. Perhaps it isn’t always; the two words have somewhat different definitions if very similar usage. It’s possible that one would want to specify both that something is not only totally whatever attribute is being ascribed, but that attribute in the most extreme manner.
I’m having trouble coming up with an example of that hypothetical, which leads me all the more … Read the rest
When I took French in high school I came across the concept of transitive versus intransitive verbs. Perhaps this distinction was made in my studies of English, but what I recall is a specific conversation in French class.
While trying to grasp what my teacher was telling me, I asked whether a transitive verb was one that required a direct object. I hoped that was a different way of saying what she had been telling us, and that she would
Mr Lanier strikes again.
When I came across the sentence, «The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process» in *You Are Not A Gadget* I thought at first that I’d stumbled across a typo that had escaped the editor’s eye. I expected that he meant *leeched* as in, sucked away as though by a parasite. While this would have made enough sense, Lanier’s choice indeed seems more appropriate.
Fortunately, I thought for a moment about who was more … Read the rest
Another one found in Jaron Lanier’s [*You Are Not A Gadget*]([canonical-url:2013/05/26/finding-internets-inner-human]). Lanier is earning points with me for teaching me words. This one in particular I am surprised not to have encountered before, as it is a field of great interest to me. I suppose the matter is probably of great interest to everyone, but even so.
This comes from the Greek, meaning «final discourse». As is so often the case going back to the … Read the rest