something is missing…

i knew that a set of three periods was called an ellipsis, but i always found it to be an odd name because it sounds to much like 'ellipse' (a synonym for oval.)

but ellipsis actually has three meanings:

[not my bad]

you may have encountered a quote with the word [sic] in square brackets and wondered what it was.

backronyms actually circumvent knowledge of rare original names to yield meaning

backronym is a portmanteau combining "back" (i.e. 'retro-') with "acronym" (i.e. initialism - a word where each letter stands for another word) to describe words that have a made up acronym after the original word already exists.

fun grammar quiz

today's new york times had their fourth installment of their little grammar quiz series to test your knowledge. i failed, catching only 4/9 grammar errors, so i will preface the link with this hint: none of the mistakes are punctuation related (as i suspected my five incorrect answers were)

red pencils ready? via new york times

sahara sundae

i grew up with the mnemonic that you want "two scoops of 's' in dessert!" to remember that dessert has an extra 's' and the big sandy place, a desert, does not.

a friend of mine told me another that made me chuckle: "'desserts' spelled backwards is 'stressed'"

speaking of segues...

there are certain words that you know how to use in conversation, and other words you can spell, but sometimes you cannot make the connection that a word you say and a word you can spell are actually the same word.

personal example: for the longest time i pronounced epitome like ep-i-TOME (tome being one syllable, like the story) even though i knew of the existence of "e-pit-uh-mee." i knew independently what each meant but it still took awhile to realize the word i was spelling correctly and the word i was pronouncing correctly were the same word.

enis ratulo sounds legitimately german

following up on a previous post regarding etaoin shrdlu, here is a list of similar "names" created using the most frequent letters (in order) in other languages:

Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?

there is a made up language called esperanto that, while not officially accepted by any country, is spoken by an estimated 100,000-2,000,000 people around the world.