Tag: animals
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Broncos vs. Panthers
In Groundhog vs. Shadow, Punxsutawney Phil easily walked to victory: his shadow didn’t even show up for his wintry wrangling with the woodchuck earlier this week. But we’ve got a bigger animal fight ahead. No, I’m not talking about Donkey vs. Elephant – or, at this point in the 2016 presidential campaign, Donkey vs. Donkey…
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Gerbils (and etymology) will bring us all together
For this post, I thought about writing on the etymology of demagogue or bigotry, which have been much in the ether lately, thanks especially to Donald Trump. But I thought twice, important as these words are right now. I thought twice because I wanted to write on something a bit more positive and, well, fun than many of…
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Stampede
Last week, well over 700 people tragically died in a stampede in Mina, a neighborhood outside Mecca where Muslims carry out a symbolic stoning as part of the Hajj. This stampede occurred in the deserts of Western Asia, but the word stampede originates near the deserts of the American West. Stampede According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), English took to stampede in…
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Language “for the birds”: New guest post at Oxford Dictionaries
I have a new guest post up on Oxford Dictionaries’ OxfordWords blog. This one is called “Language ‘for the birds’: The origins of ‘jargon’, ‘cant’, and other forms of gobbledygook.” Here is a sample: ‘Infarction’? ‘Heretofore’? ‘Problematize’? Cathexis? Disrupt? Doctors have their medicalese, lawyers their legalese, scholars their academese. Psychologists can gabble in psychobabble, coders in technobabble. For people outside…
Mashed Radish 