The blog of Oxford University Press USA, including lots on words. This blog is for anyone who commonly finds beauty, uniqueness, and joy in printed material of every stripe.Ī variety of information and views on phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and similar thingsĪn alternative to the faded Fabers and burnt Nortons. A dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste. The twitter feed of Ross Ewage, noted vulgarian. Language as it happens – looked at by linguists who know what’s really going on Graph relative frequency of words over time in Google’s digitized books.Įditor, indexer, designer, publishing consultant Tom Fairley Award winner (Or: Things I learned as a field biologist.)
Corpus of Contemporary American Englishģ85 million words of contemporary American English texts, searchable for finding frequency, collocations, syntactic roles, etc.Ī lexicon of fringe English, focusing on slang, jargon, and new words.Ī compendium of knowledge gleaned from seemingly endless scholarly pursuits in the wild. My dad’s newspaper column, about wonderful people and thingsĮxplore the etymology and symbolism of the constellations One of the best lingustic minds out there blogging.Ī blog about the arts, books, flora and fauna, vittles, and whatever comes to mind. Terms and conditions: by reading this blog you accept that all opinions expressed herein will henceforth be your opinions. Permanently angry about the abuse of English, maths and logic. Patrick Neylan, Eeditor of business reports. Michael Quinion’s site based on his book Ologies and Isms. Affixes: the building blocks of English. What this is: 1 photo + 1 word x 366 days. And now it has the solidity of tradition! Good heavens. So much for a firm basis for interpretation! An error stands on another error standing on another… Turtles all the way down? No, the bottom turtle is standing on air, but no one’s noticed. Referring to the vault of the sky, the Hebrew word most likely meant “expanse” or “spread”, but in Syriac the same verb meant “condense” or “make solid” (probably the divergent senses both trace back to a sense meaning “tread” or “beat out metal”), and that led the Greek translators to make it “firm, solid structure” – which went from the Greek to the Latin, where it was rendered firmamentum, from a verb firmare meaning “strengthen”. Evidence suggests that the people who translated the Bible from Hebrew to Greek were also confused. But when you run up against Hamlet saying “This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” well, you’re going to get confused. 
When you get a sentence like the first verse of Psalm 19 (KJV), “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork,” you can think firmament means the earth. I certainly found it confusing for a long time. So what silly person decided the heavens were the firmament? But the heavens are mostly empty space with balls of hot gas spinning about in it.
And ment makes a noun of something – it pours concrete on a concept. That seems a touch weird, doesn’t it? Although firm is not a hard word (no knocking stops in it), it has that sturdy hum like a diesel engine. And the sky, wherein the sun, moon, planets, and stars are fixed, is the firmament. That globe Atlas is holding is the celestial sphere, not our planet, and really, in mythology, he’s holding the sky above the earth. Never mind that firmament appears to have two feet firmly planted in it, m and m. (What would he be standing on if he were holding the earth – a turtle? Which is on another turtle, and so on all the way down?) The Atlas mountains, now in Morocco, to be precise. You know Atlas: he’s that bloke with the globe on his shoulders, right? So what’s he holding up? In one direction is the firmament, and in the other?
Affirm that you are fixed on the fundament.
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