The misuse of “everyday” is an everyday occurrence these days

I see it on billboards, particularly for restaurants… “Cheap prices and good food everyday!” I see it in newspapers, in bars… it has come to the point where I am ready, should I ever see it, to congratulate anyone who properly uses the word on a public sign. Here’s the thing–when it is written as [...]

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More word exercise poems

Some very dull Forest Service training recently afforded me the opportunity to compose a few more poems using random words… Take a word, see how many other words you can create using only the letters from that word, and then create a poem using only those words… Funeral near an urn learn an earl ulna [...]

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Bed

Is it strange that you call the back part of a truck the “bed,” and that’s where I sleep for the summer? It’s like it’s meant to be. 5’7″ person in a 6′ truck bed… perfect.

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Binocular(s)

This one keeps coming up for me again and again. Binoculars. A set or pair of binoculars, even. But here’s the thing… bi-nocular… as in a binocular (two eye) scope as opposed to a monocular (one eye). So in truth, the thing you wear around your neck birding is a binocular. A set or pair [...]

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Humanity

This morning, on the radio, I heard a guest say that “we have lost our humanity.” In the context I, and everyone else listening, understood this to mean that “we” (I forget who we was) were acting in a way that was not compassionate or kind. But it made me stop and think. The first [...]

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Putative bobcats seem quite lazy

Putative seems to be the new word in the carnivore world. On going over protocols for tracking wolverines this season, every track is considered a “putative” wolverine track. Which is why there is now a heavy emphasis on collecting hair and scat. DNA gleaned from these samples will allow a putative species track to become [...]

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With a dictionary beside me…

So I just finished reading Lolita by Nabokov and was duly impressed. It is a disturbing novel and a beautiful one, and very well written. I like how Nabokov crafts it so that our dislike of the narrator grows throughout the telling of the story. And I like the language… “Poets never kill.” “One drop [...]

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Grammar is addictive

I’ve been hearing the word “addicting” being used a lot in the last 3 years or so… and I’ve never thought it was really a word. Apparently I’m not the only one: This site has a good explanation It looks as though either works, although addictive is the more traditional favorite. Now if we could [...]

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Sometimes words don’t sound like what they mean

Ingenuous

This one i more often see as “disingenuous,” which, to me, sounds like a double negative. And that’s the problem with the whole word… the “in” part is not a negative at all… not incapable or insensitive, but rather interest or innocent. But doesn’t ingenuous sound like “not genuous?”

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