A Plug for One of My favorite Sites

rogersgeorge on June 22nd, 2022

It’s called A Word A Day. Here’s a recent first line:

The word pentasyllabic actually has five syllables. The term seventeen-lettered actually has 17 lettersTLA (Three-Letter Abbreviation) has three letters.

https://wordsmith.org/words/today.html (today = June 20, 2022)

Click the link and go look around: https://wordsmith.org/

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A Plug for an Article Too Long to Post here

rogersgeorge on August 12th, 2021

It’s about English’s complicated spelling rules. Here’s a paragraph from about halfway down to get you started. The whole article is worth the read.

The answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. The rise of printing caught English at a moment when the norms linking spoken and written language were up for grabs, and so could be hijacked by diverse forces and imperatives that didn’t coordinate with each other, or cohere, or even have any distinct goals at all. If the printing press had arrived earlier in the life of English, or later, after some of the upheaval had settled, things might have ended up differently.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-english-spelling-system-so-weird-and-inconsistent

Here’s the link again: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-english-spelling-system-so-weird-and-inconsistent

—and here’s a picture:

Shakespearean Neologisms

rogersgeorge on July 20th, 2021

This is a picture of about 400 of the 1000 words he is said to have invented. Click the link to go see them as links, and big enough to read.

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/words-shakespeare-invented/

Underneath the picture on the site is a link to a spreadsheet listing the data. Click it there if this link doesn’t work.

More Words that Don’t Rhyme

rogersgeorge on September 12th, 2020

Don’t need to say much about this. It’s the longest such list I recall running into.

Got any to add to the list?

I Mentioned “Mondegreen” Before

rogersgeorge on June 10th, 2020

…but since Ripley mentioned it, now the word is official. Believe it or not!

Ripley's Believe It or Not Comic Strip for April 09, 2020
https://www.gocomics.com/ripleysbelieveitornot/2020/04/09

Search on mondegreen in the box in the upper right corner to see the other times I mentioned this word. Do you have any favorite examples? Mention them in the comments.