posted immediately

"stat", used most frequently by doctors to mean "immediately" comes to us from the Latin word "statim" with the same meaning.

analog(ue)

I had thought that perhaps analog meant the opposite of discrete and analogue was the noun form of analagous (the subject of an analogy) but both spellings are the same word (like colour/color) and both spellings can have either meaning.

[via wiktionary]

sally contracted him to build her seashell stand

I just need to share this amazing (and long) tongue-twister that comes together so elegantly and is reminiscient of buffalo buffalo buffalo in that you need to stress words just right or it would (wood) not make sense.

Esau Wood sawed wood. Esau Wood would saw wood. All the wood Esau Wood saw, Esau Wood would saw. In other words, all the wood Esau saw to saw, Esau sought to saw. Oh, the wood Wood would saw! And, oh the wood-saw with which Wood would saw wood! But one day, Wood's wood-saw would saw no wood, and thus the wood Wood sawed was not the wood Wood would saw if Wood's wood-saw would saw wood. Now, Wood would saw wood with a wood-saw that would saw wood, so Esau sought a saw that would saw wood. One day, Esau saw a saw saw wood as no other wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood. In fact, of all the wood-saws Wood ever saw saw wood, Wood never saw a wood-saw that would saw wood as the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood would saw wood, and I never saw a wood-saw that would saw as the wood-saw Wood saw would saw until I saw Esau Wood saw wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood. Now Wood saws wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood.

[via wikipedia]

ante up

the latin word ante means "before" and is useful by itself but also as a root for many other words and phrases such as:

• ante - by itself a poker term for the small buy-in fee placed before the round starts.
• ante meridian - commonly seen as a.m., ante meridian translates to "before midday." (this leads to post meridian or p.m. which translates to "after midday")
• antemortem - uttered almost daily on cbs (home of c.s.i.), this word means "before death."
• antebellum - in the united states this typically refers to "before the civil war," but the phrase literally just meas before any war.
• many similar "before" words in romance languages: antes (spanish); avant (french); avanti/anti- (italian)

~there's no ekscaping these common mispronunciations

some of these are more common than others, but the words that really get me (in an engineering atmosphere) are 'acrost' and 'heighth'.

invulncerible

when i was little i learned the word invincible from superman comics. when i was a bit older i encountered a green powerup in doom that made you invulnerable and wondered why there was this slightly different word that apparently meant the same thing.

i have now discovered that these two words have subtle differences that are apparent in their latin roots:

• invincible comes from the latin verb vincere, meaning "to conquer."
• invulerable comes from the latin verb vulnerare, meaning "to wound."

so invincible means "unbeatable" - superman at times could be wounded (when kryptonite was present) but was never beaten - and invulnerable means "unwoundable" - in doom even when you were impervious to damage you could still be beaten in other ways.

aibohphobia

great addition at language log to the recent linguisteresis post on palindromes:

the Urban Dictionary claims aibohphobia is a technical term for the irrational fear of palindromicity. The etymology will raise a smile. Just stare at the word for a few seconds, and it will reveal itself to you.

[via language log]

but wikipedia is my only source

eclectic is a word that does not mean what i thought it meant. i had heard of eclectic music, eclectic houses, eclectic clothing style, and based on what i had seen the synonyms for eclectic i made in my head were whimsical, random, bohemian (if i am using that right?) and maybe a hint of snobby.

eclectic really means "of varied sources" and comes from ancient philosophers who picked and chose tidbits from several different systems of philosophy. eclectic music may have jazz, rock, and pop influences (now i can understand cities97); eclectic houses may have victorian and tudor styles blended together.

i find my taste in food to be very eclectic. golden corral fits my eclectic needs :)

harbringer

this seems to be a rarer eggcorn, but one that i was guilty of.

a harbinger is someone or something that foreshadows someone or something that is to come (synonymous with an "omen"). i mistakenly thought there was another 'r' (i.e. "harbRinger"), assuming this object or person was literally "bringing har," and har was something ominous, to be sure :)

can't dampening cause damping?

this may only interest engineers, but a smart guy i work with pointed out to a crowd of technical folk a mistake many of them were likely making: damping is the process of dissipating kinetic energy while dampENing is the process of making something moist.

looks like star trek may have had it wrong.

but i did not shoot the superscript

www.therejectionist.com

a serif is a little tail added to the limbs of letters (example). knowing this explains why many fonts are referred to as "sans-serif" meaning, in latin, "without serifs."

font types with serifs are also commonly referred to as 'roman' fonts (e.g. times new roman) while sans-serif fonts are sometimes referred to as 'gothic' or 'grotesque' (e.g. century gothic or arial)

interesting tidbits - sans-serif fonts are typically used for headlines while serif fonts are used for body text because the serifs help guide eyes consistently across one line. however, the internet has made sans-serif body text much more common because serifs often rendered weirdly on low resolution or slow refresh rate screens.

for *most* intensive purposes

an important linguistic concept is the eggcorn. an eggcorn is a word or phrase that is incorrect but is rooted in plausible sounds or reasoning. "eggcorn" itself is a reference to the common mispronunciation of the word acorn - with no official name for this phenomenon, this example became eponymous.

causes of eggcorns can vary but commonly include folk etymology ("preying" mantis), hypercorrection ("languistics"), and accounting for obscure or archaic words ("baited breath" to replace "bated breath").

eggcorns are subtly different from malapropisms, which are seen as erroneous uses of words or phrases, usually with nonsensical or comical results, e.g. mishearing song lyrics (electric boobs), confusing idioms ("moo point"), misusing big words)

for a great collection of eggcorns check out the eggcorn database. dont look too closely though, as this is a good spot for post ideas ;-)

teatea

this is a nitpicky thing. nobody should get too upset about it: the word chai actully just means "tea." whenever you hear an utterance of "chai tea," you are really hearing "tea tea." most asian languages refer to all tea as just "chai" and what americans call chai tea (the spiced stuff) is actually masala chai. its just a cool word, so we should not get too pedantic.

homning

Artwork by rocketpigeon.net

i used to confuse these all the time:

• hone - to sharpen or get better e.g. "hone your skills"
• home - get closer and closer to a target e.g. "homing missile/pigeon"

so i need to stop using the phrase "honing in"...

adversity aversion

the words adverse and averse can cause confusion and are often erroneously interchanged. Both are adjectives with negative meanings, but they are not interchangeable; they are subtly differentiated by interest vs inclination:

• adverse (adj) - unfavorable. used in the "against one's best interest" case. base word for adversity and adversary.
  
• averse (adj) - having repugnance or opposition of mind. used in the "against one's personal inclinations" case. base word for aversion.

these derived words (adversity/aversion) are the best mnemonic for deciding which to use, and have cured me of my bad habit of saying things like "I am not adverse to medicine with no averse effects."

sherbe(r)t

internationally, the words sherbet and sorbet are synonymous. the united states colloquially refers to something different with each term. sorbet is seen as a dessert similar to italian ice (i.e. no dairy) while sherbet is both fruity and creamy (due to minimal dairy content)

what is interesting is how (anecdotally) everyone learns that this dessert is called "sherbeRt" with an extra /r/ sound. this has become an aceptable and understandable mispronunciation, but is technically not the right name. if you are like me and only ever learned to call it sherbert, look at the package next time you are at the grocery store and it mght surprise you that they leave out that /r/.

glamorous pompadour

Madame Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour preceded the footsteps of Ambrose B. Burnside, Jheri Redding, and A Flock of Seagulls in leaving an eponymous hairstyle as a legacy.

The pompadour is the poof of hair made famous by elvis and sported by many subcultures today.

This odd departure from the normal linguisteresis fare is brought on by the confusion over what the king of the cosmos is referring to when he mentions that he lost his pompadour during a knife fight in the video game we ♥ katamari (part of the katamari damacy series, which means literally "clump spirit")

[via]

semicolons can be confusing; here is a lesson ;)

the oatmeal, famous for lengthy animated rants of the surreal variety such as how to use an apostrophe, has created a new lesson on a less commonly used punctuation mark: the semicolon.

the comic uses non-sequiturs to break down the uses of the semicolon, with the main reasons being:

• conjoining two related sentences that could stand on their own (do not use a conjunction such as 'and' or 'but' with this use)
• adding more pause than a comma but less than a period.
• seperating items in a list when those items already have punction (e.g. i have lived in lakeville, mn; edina, mn; and minneapolis, mn.)

the comic neglects to mention some other uses for the symbol, such as ending a line of code in many computer programming languages or a line of a matrix in a mathematical matrix. also a winky face.

[image by theoatmeal]

well, yeah

a cliché is a predictable unoriginality - when what may have been a neat idea in the past is now overdone.

the opposite of a cliché is a non-sequitur: something that has never been done before and is accomplished with a completely absurd disjointedness in relation. non-sequitur is a latin phrase literally meaning "does not follow," and is most often used with humorous intent (as a major subset of surrealist humor)

a common example of a non-sequitur is the following joke:

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Fish.

i submit that if this joke is used too often, it will become a cliché. The logical name for this transformation would just be "sequitur" meaning "it does follow [convention]," but perhaps a better name would be "sequiché." your move, ADS.

whatever gets you here

a macguffin is a plot device - something to create a plot in a story - that, itself, is left very vague or unimportant. in the words of legendary filmmaker alfred hitchcock (the word's de facto founder):

"in a thriller the MacGuffin is usually 'the necklace'; in a spy story it is 'the papers'"

it doesnt matter that the theives are planning a heist for the necklace. it could be a painting or a stash of gold - but this macguffin's importance sets the scene for every character's intentions.

recentism alert! go see avatar. there is a human/alien conflict because the humans want to mine the mineral unobtainium, a valuable substance, from the alien homeworld. the audience does not care about the details of this mineral, the only important thing is the struggle to get it.

legally binding minestrone

de facto is a latin phrase for "unofficial" or "assumed" (literally "by fact"). it is used in situations to describe something that established in practice but not necessarily documented officially or legally.

example for lost fans: jack is the de facto leader of the survivors.

read these twice

an ambigram is a word or words that can be read from more than one point of view, usually with some artistic aspect. the picture shown here says "ambigram" even when rotated 180 degrees.

go hang a salami, i'm a lasagna hog

a palindrome is something that is the same backwards as it is forwards. this can be a number, a sound, a gene sequence, a word, or (as in the title) a phrase.

for the chocolate fans

i hear so many pronunciations for ghirardelli, and i never know which is right. Now i can say it in confidence, as the famous chocalatier's own website sheds some light:

ars linguisteresica

the latin word ars is the etymological root for the english word "art." art has come to have several meanings but the original ars has the particular usage as a learned skill, such as martial arts.

the art of using 'ars' is very old: in 18 bc horace wrote the ars poetica - "the art of poetry" yet the same naming convention is still in use today (e.g. the technology news website ars technica)