InDepthNH.org (https://indepthnh.org/author/michael-ferber/)
If you’ve seen the new movie, or heard the hype and hoopla about it, you may well think it’s time to dig up your old copy, or pick a new translation to buy. There are a lot of choices.
As I watched the Norway soccer team win more games than they were expected to win in the World Cup, and saw the team and its fans join in synchronized air-rowing and chanting of “Roo!” or “Hoo!” at each stroke, I got to thinking about the Vikings, the team’s nickname, and this thing about rowing.
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution this July, we might take a moment to think about what the word revolution means, and what it has meant during its long history before 1776 and after. It might surprise some readers.
In this column I will be speaking not of words but of almost-words, those expressive sounds we make that are meaningful but not, for the most part, composed of phonemes and integrated into the grammar of our language
For hundreds of years we English speakers have come up with countless terms of abuse for each other—one of the more fertile sectors of the language—and a surprising number of them are based on urban scorn for rural folk.
English now has only one pronoun for the person we are talking to: you. It was not always so, as readers of the Bible or Shakespeare are well aware.
The Hittites were once a powerful kingdom that, at its peak around 1300 BCE, dominated Anatolia (now Turkey) and even reached as far south as Aleppo (now in modern Syria); they fought a major battle with the Egyptians, led by Ramesses the Great, at Kadesh in 1274
I have a thing about thing. It is a really interesting word, with a surprising history.
You have probably noticed that in recent years the words fortunate and fortuitous have converged in meaning. “The timing of the new mortgage rate could not have been more fortuitous.” “How fortuitous that we should meet today!”