IT USTA BE SAID…
COLLOQUIALISMS ARE here today and gone tomorrow. But like this temporal analysis, some remain. A little research and some thinking revealed several gems of both categories, which follow in no … Continue reading
GOVERNING BY WORD
WHAT WITH our being in the midst of highly divisive presidential campaigns, it’s a good time to discuss the etymology of words that are associated with how people rule themselves—or … Continue reading
CLEARING INNES IRELAND’S NAME
GRAND PRIX driver and R&T contributor Innes Ireland was larger than life. He was also a good friend, even before I cleared his name with the City of Needles, County … Continue reading
AN EDITOR’S DELIGHT—AND A DISCLOSURE
RESEARCHING AND COMPOSING SimanaitisSays.com is great fun. As the dotty old woman said, “I never know quite what I’m going to say until I say it.” And so it is … Continue reading
RED & TRACK
WE USED TO joke that the real name of the magazine was Red & Track. Subscribers, bless their hearts, would enjoy a magazine whatever was on the cover. But a … Continue reading
SHAKESPEARE FIRST FOLIO
IT’S NOT LIKE they’ve just found the original typewriter ribbon from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. On the other hand, there were perhaps no more than 750 … Continue reading
THIRD PERSON SINGULAR
THE LINGUISTIC gender war in English has been raging over the third person pronoun, particularly in its singular personal form: he/him, masculine, and she/her, feminine. There are those, macho, feminist, … Continue reading
BEAR WITH ME, DEAR, AS I SPEAK CREATIVELY
I MAY have had more pressing matters on my mind, but I was also musing on the difficulties of the English language, its pronunciation and spelling. It’s quite enough for … Continue reading
O.K. BY ME
THE Atlas Obscura website celebrated the 177th birthday yesterday of the word “okay.” The musings of Cara Giaimo, its author, encouraged me to dig into my own shelves. Briefly, as … Continue reading
“AND,” MISBEHAVING
I HAVE a grammatical gripe with the misbehaving word “and.” I’m not referring to the subtlety of the serial or series comma, aka the Oxford or Harvard comma. Me? I’m … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 