Month: October 2017
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“King-size”: A bite-size history of an America-size word
On Halloween, there’s no disputing that the king-size candy bar is the crown jewel of trick-or-treating loot. But those extra ounces of chocolatey goodness don’t just measure our taste in sweets: The history of the adjective king-size also reveals America’s changing appetites and attitudes. The original king-size labeled a different vice: cigarettes. In 1939, the…
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Book review: The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities by Paul Anthony Jones
He’s done it again. On the heels of his delightful Accidental Dictionary, Paul Anthony Jones—the word-grubbing mastermind behind the wildly popular @HaggardHawks online–is out with another collection of weird and wonderful words. This one’s called A Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities: A Yearbook of Forgotten Words (Elliott & Thompson, 2017). The publisher kindly sent me a…
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Getting up to speed with Mashed Radish
A few updates are long overdue. Last Sunday, I had a piece in the UK’s Sunday Express defending the much and wrongly maligned like. Like, you know, like. As I argue: Like isn’t a sign that we’re dumbing down English. It’s a sign of just how, like, sophisticated our language is.
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The word “harassment” likely begins as a hunting cry
With allegations against Harvey Weinstein mounting, many more women are coming forward to accuse others—from prominent figures like director James Toback to everyday men divulged in the powerful #MeToo stories—of sexual assault and harassment. These men, as we might say, are pigs. But if we look to origin of the word harass, we might say…
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Dirty, rotten “sepia”
A mix of Hurricane Ophelia and Saharan dust storms turned the sun an ominous red over much of the UK earlier this week. It also caused the sky to look an eerie yellow or, as many commented, sepia. And this fancy color word, as it turns out, has a very cuttle-y, and very un-cuddly, origin.
Mashed Radish 