September 11 was the birthday of William Sydney Porter, better know by his pen name O. Henry. Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1862, he is my favorite short-story writer, and his personal life was quite a story in itself. His birthday was remembered in The Writer’s Almanac of September 11, 2019 — As a young
With so many words in the English language (I’ve seen estimates of from 400,000 to a million), there are some interesting origin stories. For example, boilerplate. According Merriam-Webster, boilerplate can mean a syndicated material supplied especially to weekly newspapers in matrix or plate form, or standardized text, especially formulaic or hackneyed language. These meanings originated in the
A fascinating part of the English language is the origin of common expressions. For example, all my life I’ve heard phrases like “I’ll be back in a jiffy.” Until recently, I never stopped to wonder exactly what a jiffy was. Now i know — A jiffy is actually a unit of time. But like everything
The start of another busy week, so I thought it would be appropriate to share some humor a friend sent me. Have a good week! How Children Perceive Their Grandparents. 1. She was in the bathroom, putting on her makeup under the watchful eyes of her young granddaughter, as she’d done many times before. After she
There are at least a quarter of a million words in the English language. I’m basing this on the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains entries for 171,476 words in current use, 47,156 words considered obsolete, and around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language/). Yet we’re adding words all the time,
Today is the birthday of my favorite poet, Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849). Born in Boston into a family of actors, he was orphaned in 1811 after his father left and his mother died. He was raised by John and Francis Allan in Richmond, Virginia, but never was formally adopted.
Recently I read that 26 state names have been derived from Native American speech. I know English is a diverse language, containing words with many different origins, so this did not surprise me. Still, it did pique my curiosity. I did a bit of research and yes, we’ve gotten a bunch of words from Native
Yesterday I related a story about how difficult it is to learn the Thai language. But I know every language requires a lot of effort to master. The language I’ve actually studied is Spanish (not counting a Latin course in high school). I was a Latin American Studies major at the Air Force Academy. Although
In case you missed it, Google Trends recently researched the hardest-to-spell words in the first four months of this year. Their analysis identified what words was searched most often when people typed “how to spell ___” into the Google search engine. The results were tabulated by state, then published in this map. According to a
I have on occasion written about the English language, especially how it morphs to keep up with changing times. Today I have another example — The relentless advance of technology has necessitated the creation of a new word — retronym. Google it, and you get this definition — a new term created from an existing