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World Records RSS Feeds785-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments - Boulevardiers My listing last time of the many names Americans have for the grass strip beside a roadway led to numerous messages from Canadian readers. This comment comes from Elena Goodfellow: “I have not heard of any of the terms you listed, neither the British or American. I have always called it a boulevard. We also call a grassy median dividing the two sides of a road a boulevard and in addition, boulevard can be the name of a road. So where I live, our road is named a boulevard. It has a boulevard running down the centre of it and it has a boulevard beside the curb on each side of it. This part of Canadian English I’m sure is very confusing to newcomers to the country!” Lucie Singh mentioned that boulevard is also used in her part of Wisconsin; the term does appear in the Dictionary of American Regional English, with a map showing evidence in that state but more commonly from the western states bordering Can...Feed Source: www.worldwidewords.org 785-2: Weird Words: Ludibrious -
In 1807, the American diplomat, politician and poet Joel Barlow published his epic, Columbiad, which was widely regarded as a pompous and grandiose vision of the New World (even he admitted that he was no genius as a versifier). A lesser criticism concerned the many words he coined.
The Edinburgh Review wrote that some “were as utterly foreign, as if they had been adopted from the Hebrew or Chinese” and that others had been contorted from existing English words. The review recorded multifluvian, vagrate, inhumanise, conglaciate, micidious, luxed, fulminent, utilise (which has since had some success) and many others. “His new words are not necessary,” commented Washington Irving, “and very uncouth, such as cosmogyre, cosmogyral, fiuvial, ludibrious, croupe, brume, gerb, colon [not in the anatomical or punctuation senses but me... 785-3: Wordface -
Hidden word Linnie Worth asked me about apocrypha. Her brother tells her it’s plural but they are puzzled to find its singular. Her brother is correct, but it’s usually treated as a singular, even to the extent that a plural apocryphas appears on rare occasions. The original was an adjective, in the ecclesiastical Latin apocrypha scripta, hidden writings, hence of unknown or spurious authorship. The word derives from Greek apokruptein, to hide away. In the days when knowledge of Greek and Latin were widespread, the singulars apocryphum and apocryphon were known (following respectively the Latin and Greek models) but the former has long gone out of use. The Greek form survives in titles such as the Apocryphon of Mark, a supposedly expanded version of St Mark’s gospel.
Gay right and wrongs Right-wing Christian groups have aroused a controver... 785-4: Questions and Answers: No room to swing a cat -
[Q] From Mindy: I was discussing with my husband the other day the phrases no room to swing a cat and you can’t swing a dead cat without He related the usual origin of the phrases as referring to a cat o’ nine tails, but this sounds suspiciously like a folk etymology to me. Are the phrases really related, and do they refer to felines, whips, or some other cat-like object?
[A] The second of your phrases, which is variously completed, as “You can’t swing a dead cat without toppling a corrupt politician” or “You can’t swing a dead cat in the shipping industry without hitting somebody with phoney papers” or “you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Starbucks”, is a modern creation — I can’t find an example of it before the late 1980s.
It’s almost certainly derived from your other idiom, which is some centuries older. It is indeed frequently said to be from that ... 785-5: Sic! -
• Justin Beam was puzzled by a headline in an online Chicago Tribune article of 27 April which read: “UPDATE 3-Armed police arrest man at London siege.” He would have liked to learn more about these tribrachial cops.
• Peter Ronai reports: “In commenting on the finding of a cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the USA, the CBS Evening News on April 24 reassured viewers that ‘No dead cow is slaughtered for human consumption’.”
• A Telegraph headline on 26 April, since changed, provoked David Bagwell and Peter Millington-Wallace to submit it: “Sadomasochism interest no barrier to dead spy joining MI6”.
• Ted Brooks saw a New York Times report of 25 April about the parents of Madeleine McCann: “Since their daughter’s disappearance they have traveled to t... 785-6: Copyright and contact details -
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