Once upon a time, when the sky was made of canvas and the ground was made of sawdust, elephants in tutus danced on their toes and cradled showgirls in their trunks. Once upon a time, fountains of red hair spouted from high white foreheads, and saggy, baggy clowns spilled into our laughter. Once upon […]
Throughout the 1920s, in an era of mah-jongg, goldfish swallowing and bicycle racing, solving crosswords became the biggest puzzle craze ever. In 1924, The New York Times vociferously complained about the fad, branding it a “sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more […]
It’s now been five years that I’ve had the surpassing privilege of sharing “Lederer on Language” with you in this space. My weekly adventure in columny has been a perpetual joy ride for me, and that includes the many letters you’ve winged me and the responses I’ve zinged back to you. This 5th- anniversary […]
Many words possess two kinds of meaning. The basic, direct meaning we call denotation. The implied, suggestive meanings are connotations. Connotations are what give a word its individuality and color, its distinctive personality. Take the word fist, defined denotatively as “the hand clenched with the fingers pressed into the palm and the thumb pressed around […]
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 […]