InDepthNH.org (https://indepthnh.org/author/michael-ferber/)
If you were a senator from the ancient Roman Republic who had managed to learn some English while riding in your time-chariot to visit Washington DC for the first time, you would be astonished, and quite amused, at how familiar things looked and sounded, over two thousand years later and across a great ocean.
Tense can be defined as the point on the time-line that the action expressed by the verb takes place, with reference to the act of speaking, and in English there are three such points: past, present, and future. Quite a few languages have more than three.
And we have SIRI and her knowledgeable sisters who will answer all our questions quickly and amiably; recently we learned that SIRI will be “enhanced” with ChatGPT4 and OpenAI.
In 2008, for obvious reasons, I thought I had better learn more about economics and especially about capitalism, so I read a bunch of books and articles and took some notes.
There used to be a shop on Route 4 near the Epsom Circle called “Perfectly Goods.” It made me laugh whenever I passed it.
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.
When I was a boy I was puzzled by the term “horsepower” as applied to the engine of an automobile.
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.
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.