A Plug for One of My favorite Sites
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 letters. TLA (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/
Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed
A Plug for an Article Too Long to Post here
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
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.
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
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
…but since Ripley mentioned it, now the word is official. Believe it or not!
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.
