This kinda relates to the climate of tantrum and frustration that Copenhagen is offering, as well as the spools of red-tape that accompany any government decision.
In case you missed a letter the Governator sent to law-makers in Sacramento in early November, here it is in reproduction. Hard to align the letter as per the original, [...]
Guy in a tree? Don’t get it. He’s just one more anti-logger, like you lot.
We got there in the end. (No credits on this occasion – you know who you are.) Here they are for public record:
Ten Classic Antilogues
abbreviated
French
monosyllabic
meaningless
onomatopoeia
palindrome
phonetic
symmetrical
unwritten
vertical
Column 8 occupies the back page of Section 1 in the Sydney Morning Herald, and most weeks language occupies Column 8. (Always worth a regular surf to see what verbal quirk is on the agenda.) This week the topic was the tragic irony of DYSLEXIA, surely one of the trickier afflictions to spell.
Then came STUTTER - no [...]
At the risk of opening a can of words [see the Eggcorn post from a few weeks back], I’m wondering about the wording of a recent Times clue, namely:
Did run round Britain and won, luckily (6)
Without taxing the grey cells too heavily, we can see the answer is FLUKED, where FLED ['Did run'] embraces UK ['Britain'], giving [...]
Double in size, double in size….is not what INXS intended. Their rock anthem – Devil Inside – is among thousands of lyrics we mishear across the airwaves, from Mice Aroma (My Sharona) to Where Was The Thunder (Werewolves of London) to Louise the Bra Eater (La Isla Bonita).
There’s a Dallas Crane song about jetplanes and [...]
Off the bat, no Oxford involved, how many words from the list below do you dare define? All 14 run feral in Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice – and each lent me pause at the time of reading. While a few remain naggingly familiar, tempting a stab, others present new colours in the rainbow.
Next week, I’ll play [...]
Back in March this year, a crossword clue in the LA Times read: Word that rhymes with its opposite.
The answer in the end was FIRE (rhyming with HIRE), yet the clue sparked a hunt to find other pairs. Limiting the quest to words of one syllable (thus ditching all those CREATE/ANNIHILATE duos), I fudged a dozen-strong list [...]
Three weeks away in southeast Asia, and already the rice paddies are waning in the mind’s eye, quicker than the tropical suntan. Thoese fugitive words of Laos and Vietnamese are also working loose: sayanora Sabadi, ciao xin jow.
But one keepsake that’s proving harder to shake is my insurance policy, all 29 pages of it. While [...]
One small image for mankind, one big pic for this Jacobean blogger. After four years on the airwaves, posting stories and wordsmith whimsy, this mock-magazine marks my first dabble into graphics.
Ridiculous, I know. Fred Flinstone would have j-pegged by now, while the Unabomber would surely be mounting browser polls and You Tube snippets, if not blogrolling Anarchy R Us…
Jennifer Aniston comes [...]
Elizabeth Little is the poster girl of grammar. Showing no fear, this young Candian has waded into the world’s dictionaries, seeking out the quirkier rules of language. Stuff like:
+ how any number after three in Sanskrit,is plenty enough;
+ the tonal dangers of the Chinese word cao, which depending on your palate can means grass or [...]