by Jamie Chavez | Oct 18, 2016 | Words & Language
My Facebook friends and I engaged in an etymological rabbit chase the other day. I do, seriously, get a kick out of this stuff, even if I really should be working instead of hopping around my office pulling reference books off the shelves. One friend wrote: Yesterday,...
by Jamie Chavez | Oct 10, 2016 | Words & Language
A book I’ve been working on has an interesting and lovely mention of terms of venery—which are a very special form of collective nouns—and it occured to me that it would be fun to take a look at them. You know what a collective noun is—team, committee, crowd are all...
by Jamie Chavez | Oct 3, 2016 | Words & Language
Words—and the way they are pronounced—can be such funny things. And people are often passionately attached to their own interpretation, even if they’re … well … wrong. (Like the pronunciation of Van Gogh. Look it up; you may be surprised.) The Irishman and I have done...
by Jamie Chavez | Sep 24, 2016 | Words & Language
I use my Merriam-Webster online dictionary every day, and sometimes I find interesting articles or interesting people wiriting them. In this case, both. In an article called “An Oxford-Educated Southerner in Berlin,” I was delighted to read about a journalist who has...
by Jamie Chavez | Sep 19, 2016 | Words & Language
We’ve talked a lot here about how the language we use—the words, the grammar—is a constantly evolving, living, almost breathing thing. (And still, still we want to stop that process! Human nature, I guess.) I’ve written about it in various ways, from...
by Jamie Chavez | Sep 12, 2016 | Words & Language
The word amazing is still way, way overused these days. She’s an amazing mother. That movie was amazing. It’s amazing that you can get up and do that every day. That clothing store is amazing. (A clothing store? Really? These are examples ripped from your editor’s own...
