Garner's Usage Tip of the Day: mischievous
I always thought my eight-grade teacher was mispronouncing the word.
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If you’re going to begin each episode of a podcast about language with “Hey, Mikey” and “Hey, Bobby, how ya doin’, buddy?” you’ve lost me.
Garner's Usage Tip of the Day: gyro
Bryan Garner looks at gyro , gyro , and gyros . Gyroses ? No such thing.
Saag and vindaloo
It finally occurred me to wonder what the words saag and vindaloo are all about.
More thusly
Is it really a word to avoid?
Thusly
A word to avoid?
On queue
AmE and BrE.
Word of the day: homework
Carding bobby pins during the Depression.
xednI drawkcaB ehT
An analog-world tool: Merriam-Webster’s Backward Index.
Words, phrases, etymological cages
Sir Ernest Gowers, or a second- or third-generation reviser, writing about what has come to be called the etymological fallacy, the mistaken idea that a word’s present meaning must be related to that word’s etymology.
Buzz-phrase generator
From The Complete Plain Words .
Off the rails
“Former president Clinton has been on the road since January, going around the country railing for his wife.”
School closures closings
Which?
Word of the day: kindie
he recent appearance of vinyl for the young must be a related development.
Recently updated
A 1795 source for the ill-considered prohibition on sentence-ending “it .”
Word of the day: banausic
It appears in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale KIng (2011), in the extraordinary last-class hortation spoken by a Jesuit substitute instructor of accountancy.
One Word of the Year: singular they
The American Dialect Society has chosen singular they as its 2015 Word of the Year.
Word of the day: bogart
Questioning Merriam-Webster’s explanation of the word’s origin.
Word of the day: frammis
From Nancy.
New Year’s Eve 1915
What‘s a “fez horn”?
Today’s sponsor
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“Resounding words and flowery phrases”
Ellsworth Barnard: “The tendency to resort to polysyllabic vocabulary is not usually the fault of the user.”
“The most evil sounds in the world”
The sound recordist Tony Schwartz: “I found and believe that the most evil sounds in the world are the sounds out of mouths of people.”
WRONG?
By New York Times standards, clueing BORED with “disinterested” is WRONG.
Phrases to confuse
From Oxford Dictionaries, American phrases to confuse Brits and British phrases to confuse Americans.
A wrongheaded “dead words” movement
Dressing up in an awkward costume doesn’t make a writer look smart. It makes a writer look awkward — and dumb. Did I peruse the tome? No, I read the book.
Familiar phrasing
“Family and friends”: what a bland phrase.
Word of the day: hustings
A word in Zippy.
Abbreviated Latin expression of the day: infra dig
I can imagine the phrase as a bit of dialogue spoken by a Beatle in A Hard Day’s Night: “A bit infra dig , eh wot?”
Through -thing and -thin’
Anything, everything, nothin’, somethin’.