Category: Uncategorized
How I Spent Halloween With a Monkey
As we wrote before, the boy has been pumpkin-crazy for weeks. We bought him one and he insisted on taking it to the bath and to bed. He calls them “pump-kings.” And can you believe it? They’re everywhere! They all have to be identified with pointing and delightful shouts. Like last Halloween, Grammy made a…
Photos, at last, of the funnyman
The boy loves to color. And he loves playdough. It doesn’t look so colorful now. It’s turned a bland, dark gray. He blows a kiss at a birthday brunch for Mama at the end of August. Alison, Mama, Anne, and Guthrie at the birthday brunch. Alison snarls. A one-socked naked man ran through our house!…
Where would we be without “ass”?
My latest column in the Malaysia Star. … In its most common form, “ass” means one’s buttocks, rear end, behind, etc. The slangy use of it, though, means fool or stupid person. You can probably see how that came about: an ass is a taboo place on the body because that’s where we excrete our…
Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours
A guy who has been sending tip-offs on new words and slang for years, Joe Clark of Toronto, did some independent research into Canadian English spellings, looking at everything from blogs to literature to yogurt (not “yogourt”) containers. Canadian spelling really exists, he found, but it’s under threat from spellcheckers, which let American and British…
What a bitchin’ word!
Read my latest column in the Malaysia Star, bitches. … One of the measures of whether or not a word is considered safe, at least by Americans, is whether or not it’s OK to say it on television during prime time, when the whole family might be watching. “Bitch” is one of those words. In…
Don’t forget about the dialect: dauncy/donsie, faunch, and jockey box
My latest column in the Malaysia Star. … In all the talk in this space about slang, it’s easy to forget about dialect. Dialect is that language of a specific group of people from a particular ethnic or geographic background. It’s the kind of English – a word, a turn of phrase, a special pronunciation…
Wilf? Yuffer? Get real!
My latest column in the Malaysia Star. … A lot of well-publicised new words are fake. Take the word wilf as an example. It stands for “what was I looking for?” and describes the tendency of people on the Internet to get distracted. Web users intend to find information about, say, horses but instead end…
Lexicographer Laurence Urdang Dies at 81
One of my colleagues has died: Larry Urdang, 81. Paul Luna has written a bit more about him. As you can read, he had a fruitful and respectable career. He also had a generosity of spirit that led him to provide such things at the Laurence Urdang-Dictionary Society of North American Award, which I was…
Unexpected Picture Bonus!
Well, the camera was full again, so here are a few more pictures. The boy in the park at Dumbo, which is right between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges at the westernmost edge of Brooklyn. That’s the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. Smooches! Monkeys have wet kisses. Monkeys also like to kiss babies. The baby…
A thesaurus can be harmful
My latest column in the Malaysia Star. … Please don’t use a thesaurus. It does terrible things to your writing. Yes, that’s right. Do yourself a favour and forget about thesauruses. They’re harmful unless used correctly. Usually, thesaurus-users are looking for a different word for an idea they have in mind. The word they already…