The Favorite Word Problem

I sometimes wonder how many times Peter Sokolowski has been asked what his favorite word is.

A Phenomena Phenomenon?

In the last week, I have heard two people who should know better misuse the word phenomena. I didn't think this was word that needed much explaining, but twice in a week? (At any rate, maybe these flubs will be the impetus that gets me blogging here more regularly again.)

Here's how it works:

• Phenomenon is the singular form: The blinking purple light hovering over the White House remains an unexplained phenomenon.
• Phenomena is the plural:  Three or four strange phenomena were occurring there every week, so the city banned food trucks in the clown cemetery.

Any time you find yourself saying or writing "a phenomena," pause and think. Unless you're using the word in some modifying phrase, like "a phenomena-explaining discovery," you want to use the word phenomenon instead.

I have generally been shying away from writing about words from a strictly prescriptivist point of view. I don't want to be the guy who tries to tell you how you must use your language. Rather, I'd like to be the guy who shows you how to do more with your language, and to use it to better effect.

But singular phenomena just won't float. Sure, a couple decades hence we might be having the same arguments we used to have about data being singular or plural, but we're not there yet. And besides, misuse of these two words might be more dangerous than data ever could be.

Legend has it that if you stare into a mirror and say "phenomena" three times in a row, a pair of eerie pink monsters will appear behind you.

Scarier still, if you say "phenomenon" three times, John Travolta will show up and try to recruit you to Scientology.

Although these phenomena are unproven, I advise you to use these words with care.

Health, Heart, Brexiting, and Begging the Question in a Post-Truth America

Business continues to translate into busy-ness (did I mention that I was promoted to managing editor at The Saturday Evening Post?), and, for better or worse, blogging here lands pretty low on my to-do list. But that doesn't mean I'm not writing! Here are some things for you to look at over at Copyediting.com:

Oh the Horripilation!

Halloween 2010 by Armando Salum, Veracruz, via Wikipedia

As the scary clown population rises, Halloween nears, and the election gets creepier, journalists must surely be looking for some variety in how they describe the eeriness that seems to be pervading our daily lives.

I'm here to help — or rather, I was last week, when I published "Words to Make Your Hair Stand on End" at Copyediting.com. It's chock full of words you can use the next time you'd kill for a good synonym for goose bumps.

And I'm using kill metaphorically, of course. 

And Now, a Few Words from Our Presidential Candidates

Today at Copyediting.com, I wrote about four words used during Monday's presidential debate that sent people to Merriam-Webster's for clarification. But what really has the masses talking (by talking I mean tweeting, and by masses I mean four or five people) is one of the scariest images I've ever used in a post. Here it is:

Roald Dahl and the OED

This week at Copyediting.com, I wrote about the recent update announcement from the Oxford English Dictionary and its honoring of Roald Dahl's linguistic legacy on his hundredth birthday.

The OED Honors Roald Dahl

Last week, the Oxford English Dictionary honored children's
author Roald Dahl in its quarterly update.

I'm rather excited to see scrumdiddlyumptious appear in a dictionary, though I assume it will be some time before Word's spell-checker will recognize it. Guess I'll have to add it myself, because I plan on using it often.

Guiltless Filler

I would feel guiltier about not posting here for almost three months if I hadn't been so busy with writing and editing projects that, you know, pay. Here, why don't you read some of them:

5 Pairs of Uncommon Confusable Words
The internet houses a plethora of “Commonly Confused Words” lists — Google returns 1.15 million hits for that phrase. Such common confusions are child’s play for experienced editors. No, we get tripped up by the less commonly used but easily confused words.

Neither and Nor, Together and Apart
Breaking up the correlative conjunction pair neither…nor is somehow a bit trickier than separating the parts of other correlative pairs. Using neither and nor without their correlative mates, though, can throw some people for a loop.

Sand, Sun, and Summertime Vocabulary
Ah, summertime: bright sun, warm beaches, cool surf, and daydreams of actually seeing any of these things while we huddle over our computers working our wordy craft.
To mark the start of this estival period and our dreams of sandy shores, here is a small collection of beach-related vocabulary.

But Can I Start a Book Review with "But"?
My review of the new book by the Chicago University Press editors, But Can I Start a Sentence with "But"?

The Funnest Column
Should you use more fun and most fun or funner and funnest? (Answer: Yes.)

The Ultimate E: One Final Letter Can Make All the Difference
Pairs of words that differ in spelling only by the presence or absence of a final letter e, but that single letter can make all the difference. Copy editors and proofreaders alike should take care around these words.

A Historic Column
Without a doubt, this year’s presidential election will be historic. It’ll also be historical, eventually. And that can’t be said about most things. Whether you’re writing about current politics or past outrages, understanding the difference between historic and historical can mean the  difference between “this happened” and “THIS HAPPENED!!!

A Plural Problem in the Animal World
Do you know the plural of octopus, platypus, and rhinoceros? Do you really?

I have some short fiction I've been saving up, too. I'll post some of that here, too. And hopefully it won't take me three more months.

The ACES Spelling Bee

The first day of the American Copy Editors Society national conference is over. We were all given a lot of good food for thought and good food for digestion (thanks, Portland!). After the sessions were over for the day, many of us attended a raucous adult spelling bee, possibly the only spelling bee in which spellers sipped beer between words.

This year, except for the first round, the word lists were themed for each round, which made the bee more interesting as we tried to guess what the next spelling word would be based on the theme.

So, for those interested, here is the word list from the 2016 ACES spelling bee. Words in bold are the ones that eliminated contestants. The words that I misspelled, sitting in the audience with my laptop, are marked with an asterisk.

• ambiguity
• veterinarian
• rudimentary
• chastisement
• boondoggle
• bankruptcy
• provocative
• artesian
• venison
• tertiary
• subterfuge
• tantamount
• nostalgia
• limousine
• antithesis
• papyrus
• diacritic
• monograph
• virgule 
• caret
• biblioclast
• fleuron 
• palimpsest
• enclitic
• opusculum
• brevet 

  

  Portland, Oregon. An underwhelming view from an eleventh-floor hotel room.

• majuscule
• imprimatur
• colophon
• incunabulum
• Connecticuter *
• Michigander
• Louisianian
• Mississippian
• Delawarian
• Tennessean
• Utahan
• Wyomingite
• Wisconsinite
• Missourian
• bialy*
• lutefisk*
• geoduck
• knish 
• chitterlings 
• burgoo*
• cioppino*
• ptarmigan
• beryl
• loblolly
• sequoia
• palmetto
• saguaro
• chickadee
• tourmaline*
• pendanus
• subrident*
• sortition
• demiglâce
• sybaritic
• nockerl*
• cardiomegaly

This year's winner was Kate Karp, who runs her own adult spelling bee in Long Beach, California. Congratulations, Kate!

New Word Thursday: jactancy

From the Latin jacere, to throw — the same source from which we get both eject and ejaculate — the noun jactancy means bragging or boasting.

This is one of those words that has more forms than it needs. Other attested noun forms are jactance, jactation, and jactitation, the last two of which can also refer to a shaking or tossing of the body, in a medical sense. One who boasts or spasms (or, I suppose, both) jactitates.

Happy Bissextus!

"Be Careful, Clara, that's a fine Specimen!" (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In ancient Roman times, the leap day was inserted after the sixth day before the calendas of March, essentially creating a second sixth day.

Hence bis-, two or double, plus sextus, sixth.

Happy Bissextus!

To make more sense of this, see what I wrote about it last Wednesday.

Also, an old tradition says that in a bissextile year (and only in a bissextile year), women can propose to men, and men are not allowed to refuse.

Although proposing might be a bit much, a woman asking a single guy* on a date would be a nice way to mark the tradition. Just saying.

* Like me.

A New Old Word for the Political Season: bomfog

Yesterday, in honor of Presidents' Day but two days late, I published "Presidential Coinages" at Copyediting.com. With a lot of help from Paul Dickson's book Words from the White House: Words and Phrases Coined or Popularized by America's Presidents, I highlighted eleven words that had been coined by U.S. presidents.

Eleven More Homophones You Didn't Know Existed

Back in December, I published one of my more popular posts, "Ten Homophones You Didn't Know Existed." There are certainly more than ten. And because I enjoy learning wonderful new ways to spell words I'm so used to pronouncing, I figured, why stop?

So here, then, are eleven more homophones you didn't know existed.

Silence of the Limns

There's this word limn that isn't exactly widely used, or even widely known, but somehow I've seen it used at least three times in the last week. If I believed in signs, I would take that as a sign that I should write about it.

And I'm going to write about it anyway.

Deadlines

The accepted story is that, in certain Confederate prison camps during the American Civil War, a line would be drawn around the prisoners' area. POWs who dared to pass beyond that line would risk being shot dead. Thus, the line came to be called the dead line.

Deadlines these days are moments in time, not in space.

A deadline is also the reason this post appears today and not yesterday, when I normally write about a word. Yesterday — well, all week, really — I was working against a deadline on a particularly frustrating and difficult freelance copy editing project. I finished it late last night but, truth be told, I did take a small step across that deadline.

So today, I am thankful not only that such an aggravating project is out of my hands, but that I haven't had me kneecaps shot off, either.

New Word Thursday: apricity

The Midwest — my personal environs — experienced some of its first truly winter-like weather of the season this week, including snow, ice, school delays, and idiot drivers sliding off the road. One bright spark is that I was exposed to a pleasant word I didn't know: apricity.*

From the Latin word aprīcus, "warmed by the sun," apricity is a noun meaning "the warmth of the sun in winter." It's the type of hyper-specific word for a poetic concept that I just love to discover. It just sounds like a word that belongs in a Shakespearean sonnet.

Apricity led me on an exploration of other little-used winter-weather words, like psychrophile, chionoblepsia, and frigorific. I wrote about these an a gaggle of others yesterday on Copyediting.com in a post called "Underused Words for Winter Weather." Check it out.

Logophilius Central

* Thanks, Mom.

New Word Thursday: pelf

Stemming from Old French and related to the word pilfer, pelf is filthy lucre or ill-gotten riches. I found it the other day when someone worked it into a limerick.

Naturally, I couldn't wait to try that myself:

A Christian man, godly and selfless,
Who was powerful, pious, and pelfless,
Lost the fans on his side
On the day that he tried
To make all of our Christmases elfless.

Freaky Thursday: geoduck

Geoduck sounds like the animated, waterfowl hero of a National Geographic children's show about environmentalism, or geology, or geography, or something.

Ten Homophones You Didn't Know Existed

If you rely too much on those little squiggly red lines in Microsoft Word to correct your spelling for you, you've probably found yourself wondering how spellcheck missed a seemingly obvious error (and subsequently lowered your grade on a paper, caused you to get passed over for a promotion, or gave millions of Twitterers something to tease you about).

The problem may have been that your misspelling was actually a perfectly normal homophone, just one you didn't know existed. The following ten uncommon homophones might have caused a crack in your otherwise rock-solid plan for letting spellcheck be your proofreader.

New Word Thursday: conurbation

It really hit me the other day just how cynical and filthy-minded I am when I saw the word conurbation and immediately thought it was a portmanteau for congressional masturbation.

I am so disappointed in myself.

New Word Thursday: poikilotherm

A quick multiple-choice quiz:

A poikilotherm is

1. A unit of measure of the temperature of ocean water based on the water's effects on a fermented Hawaiian snack paste.
2. A cold-blooded animal.
3. A unit of measure for the heat-retention properties of wool.
4. A word I totally made up from some plausible word parts.