Nick Kaldis writes: I've started buying English etymology books for my 8-year-old daughter and I to explore; today we discovered that "butterfly" comes from "butter" + "shit", because their feces resemble butter.
Maidhc Mac Roibin spotted this oddly named item on the menu (bottom right) of the Nutrition Restaurant in Cupertino, CA:
Making the rounds on Twitter is this discovery by @KingRossco, from the UK Kindle edition of The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot by Blaine Harden:
In the Washington Post recently, Michael Miller covered the life and death of James Jeffrey Bradstreet, a doctor with controversial ideas about causes and treatments of autism ("Anti-vaccine doctor behind ‘dangerous’ autism therapy found dead. Family cries foul.". 6/29/2015). The treatments Bradstreet favored included intravenous secretin, "intravenous immunogloblin" [sic], chelation therapy, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, and stem cell therapy. […]
Jessie Opoien, "The political pitfalls of cultural crossover: Scott Walker edition", The Capitol Times 12/10/2014: In an undated letter unearthed by the liberal group One Wisconsin Now during the August release of documents from the first of two John Doe investigations related to the governor, Walker responded to a letter from Milwaukee attorney and chairman […]
More than four years ago, on Aug. 23, 2010, Doctor Science left the following comment on a post by Mark Liberman, "Cell phone cupertinos": I'm pretty sure I saw something several years ago about a whole dialect (argot? jargon? slang?) that had developed among young people in Japan (or possibly some other Asian country), based […]
Brett Reynolds wrote: It occurred to me that now that LL is (well) over 10 years old, it would be a nice feature to recycle old but still relevant posts, like BoingBoing does. So, each week you could pick out a couple of great posts from a decade earlier. As an initial experiment, today I'll […]
Matthew Dowd on ABC News This Week for 9/2/2012: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] The truth is a casualty in this. It's as if we're going to make any argument possible that's going to advantageous our side, in order to overcome the other side. The Republicans do it, the Democrats do it.
RIchard Pérez-Peña, "Student Paper Editors Quit at University of Georgia", NYT 8/16/2012: Much of the staff of the University of Georgia’s student newspaper, including the top editors, resigned Wednesday, claiming interference, even censorship, by the nonstudent managers hired to oversee it. Polina Marinova, the editor in chief of the newspaper, The Red and Black, said […]
Making the rounds today, from Andrew Bloch's Twitter feed: Bloch's comment: "Reuters applies foreign exchange rate to 50 Cent. He is now known as RM1.50 in Malaysia."
Sarah Palin's Twitter feed continues to attract a mind-boggling amount of international media attention, most recently for the act of "favoriting" a tweet from Ann Coulter, which contained a photograph of a church sign with inflammatory things to say about President Obama. Palin, or whoever runs her Twitter account, subsequently "unfavorited" the tweet, and Palin […]
Another problem of attributional abduction, this one from Josh Marshall, "So How'd it go?", TPM 7/31/2010: Our reporting duo gives us the round down of just what happened at today's pro-diversity 'Uni-Tea' Tea Party rally in Philadelphia.
Frank Rich, "Kiss This War Goodbye", NYT 7/31/2010, writing about the Pentagon Papers: Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. [emphasis added] […]