Acetio | Blogma

The Art of Manliness has a list of a few dozen key slang terms used in Victorian times.

Some are merely amusing:
Fart Catcher A valet or footman, from his walking behind his master or mistress
Sit-upons Trousers

Some give a sense of what the dangers of the times were:
Sneeze-lurker A thief who throws snuff in a person’s face, and then robs him

And some are words I wish were still in use:
Hobbadehoy A youth who has ceased to regard himself as a boy, and is not yet regarded as a man
Rumbumptious Haughty, pugilistic

http://artofmanliness.com/2010/03/10/manly-slang-from-the-19th-century/

The word "Astronaut" comes from the Greek for "Star Sailor" and was coined by author Neil Jones in 1930. It is used for space-faring people in the U.S. or on American missions.

The word "Cosmonaut" is used to refer to Russian astronauts and comes from the Greek for "Universe (Cosmos) Sailor"

While the Chinese government uses the words "astronaut" and "cosmonaut" many English-language media use the word "Taikonaut", from the Chinese word for "Space" ("taikong") along with the Greek for "Sailor" ("naut").

It seems the rule is that any nation that sends people into space needs their own word for what to call its space-pilots. Now that India is in the game (first flight scheduled for 2015), they need a word as well.

The Sanskrit for "Space" (or "Sky") is "Vyoma" and so their word is "Vyomanaut" (vee-OHM-uh-naut) according to the Indian Space Research Organisation.

I've heard descriptions of teabaggers being ignorant and racist, but it was only when I heard the word "teabonics" that I more fully realized the connection between ignorance and the political views espoused by them.

My question is why the spelling is so bad. Some of the misspelled words look like victims of haste, which could be understandable if the signs were written in the back of a car, or under the influence of alcohol. And others look like the writer has dyslexia and simply doesn't know the difference. But others seem like they might be intentionally misspelled. Perhaps the teabaggers are protesting standardized spelling as well as social services?

What does it say about a group of people when so many are either too lazy to spell-check a single sentence, or too ignorant to know how to spell simple, common words?

This Flickr set is quite a lot like People of Walmart where snarky people post photos of people who seem to be less mannered and/or worse at spelling than themselves.

But some of the pictures are troubling. The racism and hatred indicated by some of the signs makes me very concerned about the Tea Party movement. If I were an intelligent libertarian thinking about joining the Tea Party I would be revulsed by this.

As a freelancer, I sometimes wonder how I got to use a title that hearkened to the age of knights in shining armor, riding gantlets (and wearing gauntlets) and jousting.

Evidently the word "freelance" was coined by Walter Scott in his 1820 "Ivanhoe" to refer to mercenary soldiers unattached to a king. In some ways you could think of knight:freelance :: samurai:ronin at least in terms of a trained soldier either having or not having allegiance to a king.

Don Willmott writes:

"... as with most aspects of the Middle Ages, it only goes back to the nineteenth-century medieval revivalists. The earliest use of free lance (in early use, it was usually spelled as two words) meant 'a mercenary soldier of the Middle Ages', and goes back to the medieval novel Ivanhoe (1820), by Sir Walter Scott, who also effectively invented the concept of clan tartans and most other aspects of the Scottish Highlanders. This use pops up in various historical novels of the Victorian era.

The word was being used figuratively by the 1860s to mean 'a person (as a politician) who contends in various causes without being attached to a particular group'. The use of freelance referring to a writer arose by the 1880s, and the verb "to freelance" by around 1900."

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19960617

John and I were organizing some content and needed to come up with an umbrella term for email, instant messaging, and possibly cell-phone texting - all electronic communication via the transmission of text.

"Telephony"is a word that refers to telephones specifically, and sound communication in general ("tele" = 'Distant'; "phonos" = 'Voice').

And "Telegraphy" means communication by writing over distance, but usually refers to the specific technology of the telegraph.

So I suggested we call the category, "Telelogy" ("logos" = 'Word').
We did a search and nothing came up, other than sites devoted to "Teleology" (The study of causation and purpose) that had "teleology" misspelled as "telelogy".

So I guess we coined a word. Whether anyone would every use it, I don't know.

This is a punchline for which I just couldn't think of a good set-up:

"Orange you glad I didn't say, 'Banana hammock'"

If it needs explaining, it isn't worth it.

About 8 years ago, a colleague of mine, Alex Goldman, mentioned a phrase. I don't recall whether he came up with it himself or exactly how he described it, but the explanation had something to do with the potential ambiguity of spoken phrases.

The phrase is, "Ed had edited it", which, if spoken quickly but not unnaturally fast, sounds more like a sound effect than a phrase.

I don't think there is a name for such a phrase; one that is so potentially unclear when spoken - one that must be spoken slowly and deliberately to be understood.

A pangram is a sentence that includes each of the 26 letters in the alphabet.
The most familiar one is the old chestnut: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

I was sitting on the train to Philly with about an hour to kill.
I completed the crossword and sudoku in the local paper but still had about 20 minutes, so I created a game for myself: what is the shortest pangram I can write that doesn't use any of the words of the example just given? (with the exception of the word, 'the')

We will know that we've won the War on Terror once we've begun naming sports teams after terrorists groups.

The Columbus Hamas
The Knoxville Al Qaida
The Cody Hezbollah
The Sacramento Mujahedin
The Birmingham Shining Path
The Portland Al Fatah
etc.

Etymology lesson:
cybernetic:
A thermostat is cybernetic in nature: There is a mechanism in place which keeps the room from getting too hot or too cold; it regulates things to ensure everything is in balance, that if something gets too far one direction, the system kicks on to bring it back in line.