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Speaking of Words: ‘Anti-Semite’ and ‘Anti-Semitism’ as Words
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This series of columns has had little to say about politics, but there are some words that can hardly be discussed without getting into their political implications.
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Speaking of Words: Fossilized Culture in Our Language
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When I was a boy I was puzzled by the term “horsepower” as applied to the engine of an automobile.
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Speaking of Words: Anglo-Saxon Four-Letter Words
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Fart is fairly easy to track, both noun and verb. All our Germanic siblings have the word, though with varying vowels or a switch of the r and the vowel.
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Speaking of Words: Grammaticalization
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This rather alarming word does not refer to what might happen to pupils who go to grammar school but to a simple concept in linguistics that goes a long way toward explaining how languages change over time.
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Speaking of Words: Those Nasty Proto-Indo-Europeans
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“Proto-Indo-European” is first of all the name of a language, one that left no writing but is certain to have existed because it can be reconstructed in some detail by working back from its many daughter languages.
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Speaking of Words: What is the Oldest Language?
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They were created knowing some language or other, apparently, but the odd thing is that God seemed not to know it, or not very well, for after he created Adam he brought all the beasts and birds to him “to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
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Speaking of Words: New Hampshire Placenames
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You would readily conclude that it considers itself a part of England, or did so once, because of its 234 cities and towns the majority are named after British cities and towns, and of these most are English.
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What is a Word?
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Is “ish” a word? Until recently it was only a suffix, first attached to national names (“English, Swedish”), then to various nouns (“selfish, childish”), and then to almost any short adjective, meaning “sort of” or “in a way” (“brownish, youngish”).
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‘If I Was You’: The Decline of the English Subjunctive
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So even on the lips of a well-educated speaker, the English subjunctive is a shadow of its former self.