Slighcarp and Grimshaw

Jeff and I are not dead. You know, yet. We are even actually starting to dig ourselves out of the exhaustion hole we’ve been sunk in for the past couple months. Hooray!
These words have been sitting in a disordered draft on this here blog for over a week. Oops. On the upside, [...]

I started out my weekly troll through the Oxford English Dictionary this week with “bell-wether,” a bad-ass word I snatched from a poem of the lovely Jean Hartig. I found something way cooler than a neutered sheep that bearing a bell around his neck, however. I found a mythic couple of monsters–one eats [...]

I know, I’m all jail all the time these days. Even on vacation. I went to Alcatraz–what better way to amuse myeslf on my vacation from real life and my real life vocation of teaching at a creepy jail than to visit a defunct, creepy jail? The park had a charming exhibit about [...]

Reading The New York Times Sunday Magazine, as I do enjoy it, and its weekly column On Language by William Safire, I came across the word (phrase?) phrasedick. Now, I can pretty much figure out what phrasedick means–a person who sleuths out the origination and etymology of phrases–but I do so love to [...]

For your edification, this week I offer up words first used in 1619. I’ve been reading the Song of Songs, and the accompanying front-matter exegesis in this translation by Chana and Ariel Bloch. Took me about fifteen pages of reading the exegesis to decide I should really look up “exegesis.”
exegesis:, noun,
1. Explanation, [...]

The Cooper-Hewitt, full frontal

I really like the OED online. For those of you uninitiated: the OED is the Oxford English Dictionary. Sadly, it’s something like $250 to subscribe to the OED online, so I have to wait until I’m on campus to get my fix.
This week’s words come [...]