Dear Richard Lederer: Would you please write a column about the use and misuse of the word fulsome? A recent story from the Washington Post, reprinted in the Union-Tribune, began, “President Donald Trump offered a fulsome defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” I can’t tell whether the Post’s reporters are using the word correctly, to […]
Brush up your Shakespeare. Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare, And the women you will wow. – Cole Porter, “Kiss Me, Kate” Name a play written by Bartley Campbell. Of course you can’t, nor can just about anyone else alive today. Yet Campbell (1843-1888) was a popular American playwright whose giant ego towered […]
Just about everyone has seen the blue street signs with the big white H and an arrow pointing the way to the nearest hospital. Now our roads are fringed by a similar kind of road marker with a prominently displayed L doodle figure reading a book and an arrow aimed in the direction of another […]
April is national poetry month, so I will tell you a story that starts out long ago, perhaps 140 million years in the past, and maybe more. It is about a great gray dinosaur, and it starts sadly, with that dinosaur dying, sinking into the black mud in which he had been wallowing and being […]
This past Sunday, the U-T ran a report headlined LACK OF COMMA COSTS COMPANY MILLIONS IN DISPUTE. The outcome of the class-action lawsuit about overtime pay for dairy truck drivers in Maine didn’t come down to trucks, milk, cream, cheese, or hours. Instead, the holding hinged on the lack of a serial comma (also known […]
This Thursday, the Union-Tribune will hold its annual countywide spelling bee. On the model of the collectively busy bee, we call these events spelling bees. In 19th-century America a bee indicated a community effort in which neighbors pitched in, often to help out a family. Examples include chopping bee, husking bee, logging bee, quilting […]
Since January 1926, the award-winning magazine published by the San Diego Zoological Society has been titled ZOONOOZ. It’s a bedazzling, beguiling and bewitching name because it’s a palindrome, reading the same forward and backward. It also reads the same right side up and upside down. Topsy-turvy words like ZOONOOZ that retain their appearance turvy […]
Believe it or not, March 6 annually marks National Dentists Day. Dentists might not be the most popular people, but we all need them to help us preserve sound oral health. My dentists will tell you that getting me to sit still in a dentist’s chair is like pulling teeth. As a born coward, […]
The 89th presentation of the Academy Awards will unfold tomorrow evening. If you’re a fan of “La La Land” or “Hidden Figures” “Manchester by the Sea” or “Moonlight,” you are probably interested in the origin of the name for the gold-plated statuette awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The figurines were […]
A number of readers of this wordstruck column remember, from back in those school days, school days, dear old golden rule days, the challenges and joys of diagramming sentences. Those solid and dotted horizontal and diagonal lines, with words, phrases and clauses written above each one, acted as a pre-GPS map to help you navigate […]