How well do you know your fonts? Me, I can tell the difference between serif and san-serif, but aside from a few fonts like Papyrus and Comic Sans I could...Continue reading
Category: Language
This Word Does Not Exist
Here’s something fun for your Friday. I just found (via Reddit) a site where an AI invents words and their definitions every time you refresh the page. For example: This...Continue reading
A Dozen Words That Derive From Numbers (video)
I was working on making an infographic on words that derive from numbers when I found the following video. (I was planning to crib from it, but I thought you’d...Continue reading
If You Can Correctly Pronounce Every Word in This Poem – (Actually, Most People Can)
The following poem is called The Chaos. It was written in 1922 by Gerard Nolst Trenité. This poem is frequently shared as a joke that reinforced the outdated and provincial...Continue reading
The Five Types of “Q” Tails
If you read this blog then you probably know about serif and san-serif fonts, how to tell the difference. But did you know there are several unique types of tails...Continue reading
AP Wants Hyphens to (Literally) Go the Way of the Oxford Comma
The Oxford or serial comma is one of the more divisive parts of the English language (even more so than the singular they), and it looks like the hyphen will...Continue reading
First Brexit, Now This: Jacob Rees-Mogg Wants Staff to Use Two Spaces After a Period
As you may know, there’s a fairly common practice that when an official is elected or appointed to a new position, said official sends out a style guide for their...Continue reading
What If English Were Phonetically Consistent? (video)
English is a language that doesn’t just borrow words, it follows other languages down dark alleys, clubs them over the head, and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary (or so...Continue reading
When Dictionaries Ruled the World
It’s 2018 and we live in an era where the Oxford English Dictionary adds words to its lexicon willy-nilly. If a word is used somewhere in the word by an...Continue reading
Infographic: How to Correctly List Adjectives in English
Here’s a tip about the English language that native speakers learn instinctively and ESL learners have to learn the hard way. Did you know there’s a reason that early pop...Continue reading
Infographic: Weird Plurals
The English language grows by pursuing other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary. It is ridiculously complex and contradictory, and nowhere is this more...Continue reading
The Ten Lost Letters of the English Alphabet (video)
Here’s a fun and useful video for anyone trying to read historical documents or trying to write historical fiction. As everyone who has heard the song can attest, English has...Continue reading
How to Say a Lot and Mean Nothing (videos)
Lorem Ipsum is the name for a class of text generators that can create vast quantities of almost intelligible content. There is apparently an audio equivalent. (It doesn’t have a...Continue reading
With the Help of Ivanka Trump, Dictionary.com Chooses “Complicit” as its Word of the Year
In a nod to current events, Dictionary.com has chosen the word “complicit” as its word of the year: Defined as “choosing to be involved in an illegal or questionable act,...Continue reading
About That “Dramatic Growth of Swearing in Books”
A recently published academic paper has shown that the weakening of censorship inside publishers has lead to a dramatic increase in the use of swear words in American books since...Continue reading