Category: Varia
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The air was a viscous pane through which I looked into the world. I sat frozen under the weight of the heat as a bead of sweat rolled from my freshly shaved lip onto my grey shirt. Overhead, the ceiling fan turned and moved nothing. Even the bees were still.
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Today, anyone who understands or studies English knows the English alphabet has twenty-six letters. Emphasis on the word today since English has lost and gained several letters over the centuries. Many of these losses and gains help us explain why we pronounce the same letter combinations differently. For example, th in this doesn’t sound the…
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Inevitable should be the word, but perhaps not. “A likely outcome” might seem more appropriate. I should apologize to several people. I don’t know where to begin. Given the situation, the commuters should be top of mind, but then we have the train operator who had no choice in it. He saw it and might…
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The Other Side of Elsewhere: Lost in Thought is a personal writing project in progress; there is no workflow, design, or 508 compliance relevance to it. The HTML is compliant, as my designs generally are. I’m posting it here because sometimes people need a break just to have a laugh. The prose is British English…
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In previous articles about etymology and usage, I mentioned the malleability of English since it incorporates so many words from diverse languages. Sometimes these loanwords include diacritics, which are symbols that alter pronunciation, distinguish words, indicate stress, or mark a historical spelling. Think of characters like â, à, ä, ç, é, ê, ñ, and ó.…