WHAT’S THAT IN OLD ENGLISH? PART 1
HERE ARE some tidbits about Old English, OE, for short, gleaned from a recent exhibition at the British Museum, a BBC article reviewing this exhibition, and my usual Internet sleuthing. … Continue reading
STYLISH WRITING PART 2
YESTERDAY IN PART 1, several sources were cited as references here at SimanaitisSays: Merriam-Webster, Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the … Continue reading
STYLISH WRITING PART 1
THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of authorities on writing style, some of them even worth emulating. Readers of SimanaitisSays may already sense my trust in two sources, Merriam-Webster and The Compact Edition … Continue reading
DASH IT ALL!
THERE’S A MULTIPLICITY of punctuation marks that look quite similar: -, –, —, and ―. These are, respectively, the hyphen, the en dash, the em dash, and the horizontal bar. … Continue reading
SEVERAL MATHEMATICAL ETYMOLOGIES
WORDS IN MATHEMATICS have precise meanings. No surprise, this. And sometimes their etymologies have good tales to tell. Let’s look at “theorem,” and two of its related terms, “corollary” and … Continue reading
ETYMOLOGY: SCOUNDREL
TO QUOTE Trumpery of January 14, 2019, the president said that FBI personnel were “known scoundrels.” Were I a second-grader, I might respond, “It takes one to know one.” Given … Continue reading
ON PARTICLES
MRS. GRIMBLY, REST her teacher’s soul, would be disappointed that I’d forgot the meaning of an English language “particle.” Maybe I earn some redemption by recently learning about particles in … Continue reading
ETYMOLOGY: TO COZEN, A COZENER
GIVEN THAT we may be entering the second half, and perhaps the end game, of Trumpery, it is not inappropriate to discuss classical terms for the personality type, in particular, … Continue reading
PASS THE PASTICHES, PLEASE
THE YEAR 2019, according to Alexandra Alter in The New York Times, December 29, 2018, will be one of “New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out.” She … Continue reading
GREMLIN TIDBITS PART 1
YESTERDAY AT SimanaitisSays, we talked about Roald Dahl and his dealings with Walt Disney, which culminated with the book The Gremlins. Today and tomorrow, in a continuation of this theme, … Continue reading
