Some years back, when my mother was still alive, I called her one day to find out how she was doing. “I’m a little tired today,” she said, “because I didn’t get much sleep last night.” What kept you up? I asked. “Well,” she answered, “you know I always read a little bit before I … Continue reading Lost in a Book

By the end of this post I want to get to the word helicopter, but first I will consider a different group of words: telephone, telegraph, telegram, telescope, and so on. These are all compound words, and it’s easy to see the parts of the compounds: the first part is tele and the second part is, respectively, phone, graph, gram, and scope. … Continue reading Etymological Entertainments #2

Etymology, the history of words, is entertaining and informative. It’s entertaining to find out that the word idiosyncrasy is formed from three Greek roots: idio- (personal, private, one’s own), syn (together), and krasis (a mixture, a blend)—so an idiosyncrasy is the personal things you have mixed together. The word idiot comes from the Greek idiôtês, a private person, a person who keeps to himself, a … Continue reading Etymological Entertainments #1

In my previous post on meaning I talked about the meaning of the dative of interest and the meaning of what I called parenthetical “well”. In this post I will talk about he meaning of one of the rhetorical figures—tricolon, which is made of three items in more or less parallel structure. Abraham Lincoln used … Continue reading Language and Meaning #2

Meaning is at the center of what interests me about language and literature. Meaning, as I understand it, covers a lot of ground, and it includes kinds of meanings that many philosophers and even some linguists wouldn’t call meaning. Here’s an example. Some years ago I happened to be shopping in a small store in … Continue reading Language and Meaning #1