What matters most for children in their family relationships?
Navigating the vast number of opinions about what matters most for children’s healthy development can be a daunting and seemingly endless task.
April 2026
Tearing apart a book
For several years, I taught a course on the history of publishing.
Sit thee down, sorrow!
It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from.
The Kissinger Tapes
When one reads thousands of pages of transcripts of Henry Kissinger’s phone conversations from his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, as I did, one gets a pretty good sense of his personality, temperament, and character.
Hogs, hedges, hedgehogs, and BA’s
About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder.
Unabridged: some thoughts on a new book about dictionaries and words
Unabridged refers to the title of Webster’s great dictionary. The author of the book, published by Grove Atlantic Monthly Press (New York) in October 2025, is Stefan Fatsis.
An etymological hamburger
My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.