Category Archives: English language

Big games don’t phase him and other misused pears

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Want some more fun reading other people’s mistakes with homonyms? It’s impossible to run out of material for this series of pears pairs of words people misuse. .C.J. Stroud had an amazing rookie year as quarterback for the Houston Texans. His offensive coordinator said, “He’s proven that big games don’t faze him.” Unfortunately, in my local paper, the headline proclaimed, “He’s proven that big games don’t phase him.” Another issue of the same paper included the headline, “A peak inside ‘safe injection site.’” Time was when newspapers had editors, part of whose job it was to fix errors like that.   We don’t expect much from the Web. A Google search result page had an ad with the headline “Books by Doctor’s.” But social media is a gold mine of misused pears.

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Ghoti for lunch? What other fast food can we order?

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Everyone knows that George Bernard Shaw, a proponent of spelling reform, pointed out that “fish” can be spelled “ghoti.” Along with a lot of what everyone knows, it’s wrong. “Ghoti” does not appear in any of Shaw’s writings. So where does it come from? And why does it make some people mad? All the necessary research is making me hungry, so I’ll have to decide what to get when I go out for lunch—and how to spell it.

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Using colons: an explanation follows

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Colons are among the oldest punctuation marks in use. At first, they indicated a pause somewhat longer than a comma and shorter than a period.  Now, they more likely indicate that what follows is related in to what comes before by offering some kind of explanation. Or to put it another way, a colon means the sentence isn’t finished, and what follows is important. Colons also have important roles besides in sentences. The rules for using them are straightforward and not controversial.

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Animalia: cock and bull stories about phrases and animals

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English has many idiomatic phrases that refer to animals. There are certainly too many for one post. For this one, I picked four animals that each appear in two different phrases in my collection. As it turns out, in most cases, experts are not certain about the phrase origin. In some cases, non-experts have put forth some truly unbelievable stories. They can be the most fun.

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11 phrases and idioms on death, dying, and not quite dead

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October seems a good time to look at phrases and idioms about macabre subjects such as death and, well, the not quite dead. Many people find the subject of death so disturbing, even terrifying, that they need to find some less troublesome synonym, whether it makes any sense or not. If the phrase is somehow humorous, so much the better. And what if, after the burial of the corpse, its spirit (or to use the earlier English word ghost) hangs around to haunt a place? That’s even scarier. Ghosts have long enjoyed a prominent place in popular culture, but lately zombies seem even more popular. I haven’t found a lot of idioms about zombies and vampires, but ‘tis the season to examine word origins.

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