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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 Read more.
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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. Read more.
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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 Read more.
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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. Read more.
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From “to” to “too”
A trend has spread on social media following the many and disturbing allegations of sexual assault and rape against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein: me too, which tens of thousands women are posting to express that they, too, have been assaulted or harassed. The little word, too, so simply yet powerfully bringing attention to how pervasive, Read more.
Mashed Radish 