St. Patrick’s Day will cavort through a merry jig tomorrow. So today I am throwing some bull — not just any kind of bull, but an Irish bull. And while I’m at it, I’ll toss in a stampede of Irish bulls. What is an Irish bull? I’m glad I asked me that. Some dismiss it […]
The 50th annual San Diego Union-Tribune Countywide Spelling Bee will take place this coming Thursday, March 14, at the Town & Country Hotel and Resort in Mission Valley. The overall winner of the contest will be awarded an all-expense-paid trip to compete in the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee Washington, D.C., in May. This orthographic […]
The San Diego Festival of Science & Engineering will blast off with Expo Day at Petco Park today, 10 am to 5 pm. Expo Day is the Festival’s signature event, where more than 130 local organizations provide interactive exhibits and activities to budding scientists The learning dressed up to have fun continues with Festival Week […]
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: An assignment by my senior high school English teacher gave me a life-long verbivore hobby — looking up etymologies of words. She asked us to turn in a couple, and mine were pretty and nice. In the past, these words had unflattering overtones. To me words became a living history of the […]
The publishers of Oxford dictionaries have recently identified 20 words that are especially difficult to spell. Here they are alphabetically, but in their commonly misspelled forms. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to spell each defective word correctly. Answers follow. 1. acommodate 2. artic 3, Carribean 4. cemetary 5. conscence 6. deductable […]
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: In a sequence of adjectives, English speakers and writers know in what order the adjectives should go, as in “a big, beautiful statue,” rather than “a beautiful, big statue.” Why do we not have to be taught “rules” like this? -Janet Stern To begin with the most basic of questions, how do […]
Black History Month honors the contributions of African Americans to U.S. history. This celebration began as Negro History Week and was founded by Carter G. Woodson, a noted African-American historian, scholar, educator and publisher. The observation became a month-long celebration in 1976. February was chosen as Black History Month to coincide with the birthdays of […]
Tomorrow, January 27, will be National Bible Sunday, a time meant to celebrate the power of the Bible in so many lives. The word bible derives from the Greek biblia, which means “books.” Indeed, the Bible is a whole library of books that contain many different kinds of literature — history, narrative, short stories, poetry, […]
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: In the King James Bible, man is said to be made in the “Spit and image of God.” In the Catholic version it is translated as the “image and likeness of God.” As a girl can be described as “the spitting image of her grandfather,” what does spit describe? -George Lillis I […]
In the Golden Globe Awards this past Sunday evening, Willem Dafoe was nominated for best actor for his role in the film “At Eternity’s Gate.” Dafoe portrays Dutch expressionist Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings, including “The Potato Eaters” (1885), “Starry Night” (1889) and “Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear” (1890), may be the best known […]