It's happened again: Los Angeles Times readers are up in arms over vocabulary. Last time it was a contretemps over a letter to the editor complaining about tough words like, um, contretemps. This time it's commenters on the LA Times movie blog, "The Big Picture," who are slamming a post about the title of a forthcoming movie, Synecdoche, New York.Continue reading...
Today's question for Mailbag Friday comes to us from Valerie P. of Ottawa, Ontario. Valerie writes: "I was visiting a heritage village in Nova Scotia when a guide in a traditional tailor's house told me the origin of the expression, mad hatter. He said that the beaver fur the popular top hats were made of was preserved with mercury. The workers gradually absorbed this mercury while making the hats and eventually became mad. The explanation seems a bit sketchy; can you fill in the details, or correct the explanation?"Continue reading...
On the Web you can find some well-traveled lists of medical malapropisms, supposedly collected from patients who misunderstand names of diseases and medications. So for instance, Alzheimer's disease becomes old-timer's disease, sickle-cell anemia becomes sick as hell anemia, spinalmeningitis becomes smilin' mighty Jesus, and phenobarbital becomes peanut butter balls. These lists are good for a laugh, but it turns out misunderstandings of medical terminology can sometimes have dangerous or even deadly consequences.Continue reading...
A little while back we reported on a Los Angeles Times reader complaining about difficult vocabulary words like contretemps and phantasmagoria appearing in the newspaper. Other L.A. Times readers (and our own commenters) vehemently disagreed, saying that newspapers should shun the old maxim, "Don't use big words." The New York Times Magazine clearly does not have a "No Big Words" policy, since Sunday's edition featured an article with a favorite word of the late logophile William F. Buckley, Jr.: eristic.Continue reading...
It's the biggest literary sensation since Harry Potter: Stephenie Meyer's
Twilight saga is coming to an end with the fourth and final installment in her best-selling series of vampire romance novels. Breaking Dawn goes on sale a minute after midnight on August 2, and bookstores across the country are holding Twilight parties for fans who want to buy the book as soon as it's available. The only question is: what to call this fervent fan base? Some want to be called twilighters and some prefer twi-hards. It's an indication of just how enthusiastic the fans are that this terminological issue has become a point of contention.Continue reading...
Last week we featured a debate over contemporary usage of whom, with Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre squaring off against Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky. To be honest, the exchange was a bit too civil and reasonable to live up to its billing as a "usage showdown" — at least based on the Visual Thesaurus definition of showdown as "a hostile disagreement face-to-face." I was amused to see that on his copy-editing blog, "You Don't Say," John McIntyre facetiously referred to the debate with an even more inappropriate term: smackdown, which most people (in the U.S. at least) would associate with professional wrestling. Other violent confrontations ending in -down include beatdown and throwdown. And where do hoedowns fit into all of this?Continue reading...
It's hard to keep up with techie terms these days. Last week, Apple Inc. announced it would no longer use the word push to describe the way that its new online MobileMe service communicates to personal computers and electronic devices like the iPhone. Turns out the service wasn't always "pushing" data to "the cloud" as quickly as users were expecting. To which non-technophiles would probably say, "Huh?"Continue reading...