Recent Posts

1

English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« Last post by Tante Shvester on November 10, 2025, 04:50:26 AM »

Walkie-Talkie is such a ridiculous name for a handheld two-way radio.  It's like they let the toddlers name it (it was the Army, though).  I work with people from all over, so I asked what they call it in their languages.   In Spanish it's walkie talkie.  In French it's talkie walkie (so they changed it, but didn't really improve it).  In Italian it's walkie talkie.  In Swahili it's walkie talkie. In Haitian Creole it's walkie talkie.

I asked the internet to translate it to Hebrew, German, and Albanian.  It's walkie talkie, walkie talkie and . . . Radio Dore. 

2

English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« Last post by rivka on October 31, 2025, 03:36:46 PM »

Article title on an academic site: "The Stakes of Vampire Scholarship".

Seriously? Who thought that was a good idea? (The article is a book review, and is actually moderately interesting.)

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« Last post by Tante Shvester on October 24, 2025, 09:26:56 AM »

We can only pre-empt.  No one post-empts, or just empts.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« Last post by Tante Shvester on September 29, 2025, 11:29:00 AM »

Debut and Rebut do not rhyme.  Not even close.


That is all.

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English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« Last post by Jonathon on September 26, 2025, 08:49:08 AM »

Trump has unveiled a number of moves aimed at cutting drug prices in recent months, but he has yet to move the needle on reducing costs – much less slashing them by 1,500%, which is mathematically impossible, experts say.

"experts say"

link

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« Last post by Jonathon on September 09, 2025, 10:39:40 AM »

Huh. I'd never thought about its etymology before.

compound bone at the base of the spine, 1753, from Late Latin os sacrum "sacred bone," from Latin sacrum, neuter of sacer "sacred" (see sacred). Said to be so called because the bone was the part of animals that was offered in sacrifices. The Late Latin phrase is a translation of Greek hieron osteon. Greek hieros also can mean "strong" (see ire), and some sources suggest the Latin is a mistranslation of Galen, who was calling it "the strong bone."

link

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« Last post by Tante Shvester on September 09, 2025, 10:30:25 AM »

Sacrum, meaning butt, is from the same root word as Sacred.  It's not the first part that I think of when I think of what parts of the body might be the holiest, but I guess tastes vary.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« Last post by Tante Shvester on September 09, 2025, 07:08:23 AM »

Smithereens.   Now I want to keep a single smithereen as a memento.

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English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« Last post by rivka on September 05, 2025, 12:02:01 PM »

Um. "More lighting, more wildfire"

Well, let's talk about that headline (and the content that followed). "Lighting" and "lightning" are very different things, and repeatedly using the two words interchangeably is not impressive. In the five hours since the email went out, they have managed to fix all the instances of "lighting" on the web version, at least. And they changed the article title, so no more oddly-singular "wildfire" either.

No correction notice, though.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« Last post by Jonathon on August 12, 2025, 12:14:09 PM »

Mouseover text: "Achilles was a mighty warrior, but his Achilles' heel was his heel."