Posts by Christine A. Lindberg
The Mayflower Compact
Having undertaken . . . a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends [...]
Scarecrows: those anthropomorphic (not avian) symbols of the season
The vestiges of Halloween linger in various front yards and on the occasional porch step, but mostly by now the skeletons and witches have retreated into storage along with the gossamer spider webs, howling mummies, and detached body parts that adorned our neighborhoods so cheerfully in our annual salute to October 31. A contraction of [...]
The poetry of autumn
I do not grieve the passing of summer the way some folks I know do. Indeed, I grew up in a household where the turning leaves evoked a collective sigh of dismay, as if the ungreening of foliage were signaling another inevitable death march into darkening afternoons and mornings too cold to bear. As the [...]
Mooselookmeguntic and Sopchoppy: America’s lakes and rivers
If you love words, chances are you have a favorite dictionary and probably a well-used thesaurus. Your bookshelves may hold some specialized resources as well – books about usage, idioms, puzzle solving, vocabulary building, rhyming, and so forth. If you have a particular fondness for words with an unusual flavor, you’ve probably browsed through books [...]
There’s nothing like a good spoonerism to tickle your bunny phone
The English economist Sir Roy Forbes Harrod (1900–1978) once said that, compared to all the scholars he had known at Oxford and Cambridge, the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930) was the most exceptional in “scholarship, devotion to duty, and wisdom.” There is no reason to question Harrod’s assessment, but that’s not exactly the imprint for [...]
Redundant expressions
Bad habits are hard to break A bad practice in writing (and speaking) is redundancy. Anyone who has sat through a speech that goes round and round and uses the same few words over and over knows what I mean. We may sometimes do this deliberately, for stylistic reasons, or in order to raise the [...]
I admit it . . . I’m dog-given
I love dogs. I think I was just born that way. Given that I’m part of a vast community of canophilists, it’s never made sense to me that dogs often feature in an unfavorable way in English. Every group in the animal kingdom is represented in at least a few phrases, idioms, allusions, and metaphors, [...]
Alluding to illusions …
Emmy host Jimmy Fallon … made a sly illusion to Conan O’Brien’s firing as host of “The Tonight Show”. CNN transcripts, August 2010 (taken from the Oxford English Corpus). As the above incorrect usage shows, among many troublesome twosomes in the English language are illusion and allusion. It doesn’t help that their pronunciations are similar, [...]
Blog categories
- Competitions and quizzes (26)
- Dictionaries and lexicography (114)
- English in use (301)
- Grammar and writing help (58)
- Interactive features (46)
- OED Appeals (4)
- Other languages (49)
- Varieties of English (28)
- Word origins (156)
- Word trends and new words (91)
