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.

A New Look for Copyediting.com

Copyediting.com is wearing some nice new threads these days. Go to the website now and ooh and aah at the slick new look. (What's even better than how it looks for readers is how it works for contributors.)

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.

Writing Prompt: Another Childhood Memory Reclaimed

I won't claim to understand in the slightest the whole bronies thing — adult men who follow My Little Ponies with more energy and spending money than its target audience of little girls. Now coloring books for adults are landing on best-seller lists. (I understand this more — the almost meditative act of filling in white space and the urge to create.)

That leaves me wondering, what's next?

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.

New Year, New Job, New Goals

I'm not a big fan of new year's resolutions. My go-to resolution, if people ask, is simply this: to not break my new year's resolution. I'm not sure whether that qualifies as tautological, paradoxical, or both, which is why I like it.

But this year, some things came together to make the start of the 2016 a true new beginning for me.