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Speaking of Words: What Would We Do Without Do?
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One of the many features of English that makes it weird compared to other European languages, and even to its West Germanic cousins, is its extravagant use of the word do.
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Speaking of Words: Our Planetary Language
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English is indisputably the world language today, and how it got to be so is a topic well worth discussing, but in this column, I mean something else by planetary.
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Speaking of Words: Metaphor or Simile?
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We can imagine someone saying “my love is literally a rose,” but that is to use “literally”
metaphorically, as an emphatic adverb, like “really.”
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Speaking of Words: Let’s Talk Turkey
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The bird we know as the turkey, which we eat at Thanksgiving and see walking around our New Hampshire woods and lawns much of the year, is native to North America, mainly in the United States but with some in Mexico.
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Speaking of Words: Words About Nature
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A reader suggested I write a column about words referring to nature and ecology. That struck me as a good idea, because many such words have interesting histories and connections to other words, and some have been recruited for ideological warfare.
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Speaking of Words: How Many Words Could English Have?
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If you count chemical names such as dimethylformamide and monothioglycerol, or medicines such as rivaroxaban and zanubrutinib, you would think the number of possible English words is effectively infinite, even if you place a limit on the number of syllables they can have.
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Speaking of Words: God as a Word
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I want to look at an ambiguity about God, capitalized, but before that: Where does the word come from? Words that mean “god” are quite different even among the languages of our Indo-European family.
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Speaking of Words: Let’s Talk Tongue
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A little muscle weighing about three ounces at full size, the tongue has two marvelous talents—it tastes and talks—as well as some subsidiary ones.
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Speaking of Words: How English Gets New Words
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On top of the mainly inherited stock of Old English words have come great waves of French, Latin, and Greek, and lesser streams of Spanish (plaza, mosquito), Native American languages (canoe, tomato), Italian (pasta, casino), Dutch (boss, cookie), Malay (ketchup, bamboo), African languages (jazz, banana), and of languages in nearly every place on earth.