There's a little lake near here called Sob Lake. I only recently learned the etymology of this name. According to Akrigg and Akrigg's British Columbia Place Names, the lake was originally named by a survey party. Finding the homesteader who lived nearby obnoxious, they recorded their opinion of him by naming the lake "S.O.B. Lake". […]
My little posting on Nico Muhly's "I like the crotch on the idea that …" has elicited a flood of e-mail suggesting that crotch is just a malapropism of some kind — an eggcorn, perhaps — for crux. I've dismissed this proposal, in part because of the preposition on in Muhly's sentence, in part because R. […]
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Caught on-screen in an episode (set in Namibia, a re-run from some years ago) of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, a travel-and-food television show: This program contains indigenous nudity. Parental discretion is advised. It's a warning that there were to be (female) breasts and (male) penises on display, though surely only fleetingly or out of the […]
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The other day, I dropped a passing reference to the misuse of infer to mean "imply". The facts, as John Cowan reminded me in a comment, are more complicated. A few minutes of research reveals that the truth about infer is even more complex — and more interesting — than I suspected. Let's start with […]
This speaks for itself, I think — the first referral from the new Cuil search engine that I've noticed in our referrer logs: (Click on the image for a larger version.)
The text for the day comes from Paul Brians's Common Errors in English Usage, in the entry Artic/Arctic: Although some brand names have incorporated this popular error, remember that the Arctic Circle is an arc. By the way, Ralph Vaughan Williams called his suite drawn from the score of the film Scott of the Antarctic, the Sinfonia Antartica, but that’s Italian, […]
Adrian Morgan pointed out to me a Usenet comment in which someone says of some course of action that it "can hardly be a sane policy for anyone who is not evincing signs of heading distinctly dagenham". In this context dagenham is apparently to be taken as a synonym for "insane", by a rather devious […]
Yesterday, a correspondent I'll identify as "Kevin S" sent me a left-handed compliment: Someone recommended your posts on Language Log as an instance where I might encounter a rational form of Descriptivism. I must admit, you do generally write well, and your "mask of sanity" appears firm. It doesn't take long, however, before the mask […]
A collection of Bizarro cartoons I've been accumulating for some time:
Because of the recent catastrophe in the Irawaddy delta, the names of the country formerly known as Burma are in the news again. The same thing happened last fall, when the news was full of protest marches led by Buddhist monks ("Should it be Burma or Myanmar?", BBC News Magazine, 9/26/2008): The ruling military junta […]