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Bouncy-ball-ectomies, God complex-ectomies and Other Suffix Surgeries

I’m no doctor, but Facebook-ectomy is a helluva creative word, and it occurs to me that I’ve been taking -ectomy for granted as a wild and wooly word-producer. Well, I haven’t completed ignored it, as my nonce-word blog has included ponytail-ectomy, butthole-ectomy, homework-ectomy, and who-knows-what-ectomy. My favorite finds are right-side-of-my-head-ectomy and alien-head-ectomy. I’m pretty sure either surgery would qualify as an ouchie…

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Liking (or at least understanding) like: Part 2

In my last post I discussed how the word like has a long history in English. I also talked about its perception as a scourge on the language. But there isn’t just one like—there’s an array of likes. The thing is, they all sound the same. This makes it seem as though like is being used often (some will say too often), but those likes aren’t all doing the same thing. Each one has a specialized job.

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Monthly Gleanings: June 2010

I often mention the fact that the questions I get tend to recur, and I do not feel obliged to answer them again and again. Among the favorites is the pronunciation of forte “loudly” and forte “a strong point.” Those who realize that the first word is from Italian and the second from French will have no difficulty keeping them apart, though I wonder why anyone would want to say forte instead of strong point or strong feature: in today’s intellectual climate, elegant foreignisms are paste rather than diamonds. Very common is the query about the difference between “I could care less” and “I could not care less.” The “classic” variant is with the negation. Perhaps someone decided that “I could not care less” means “I do care for it” and removed not.

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Monthly Gleanings: May 2010

Dickens and non-standard speech. In connection with wash-up for worship in Pickwick, it has been noted that, according to some, Dickens’s phonetic spelling cannot be trusted. I am aware of this verdict (compare, among others, his enigmatic kyebosk for kibosh). His rendering of the Yorkshire dialect (in Nicholas Nickleby) and even of Cockney has been challenged more than once.

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