Monday, November 5, 2012

A Word on Words

You know what's weird?  The English language.  It's a bit of a soapbox of mine, but I'll try to keep it pauciloquent.

Our idioms are strange.  I understand them, and I'm a word nerd, so I actually know the etymology of them, but there are still some very odd ducks. 

"Horse of a different color:"  I think of purple ponies.  Always purple.  I don't know why. 

"Mind your Ps and Qs:"  And Ds and Bs, because the lower cases all look pretty damn much the same.  (The whole beer thing is much happier.)

"Square meal:"  For some reason, our lesson on the food pyramid in grade school always included this phrase, prompting me to believe that diet and geometry were closely linked.

We've also got strange words like "blurb" and "oaf" and "quire" (i.e., two dozen sheets of paper). And what does "i.e." mean, anyway?  In other words (wink), what the hell are we saying every day?


I'm not the only one.  Check out these cool Internet thingers for more...


(True:  Don't even get me started on ten dollar words.  None of us have time for that.)

6 comments:

  1. The best part about getting a "square meal" is that the old "food pyramid" is now a circle (round dinner plate), and there's still no "square" involved!

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  2. Mmmm, pumpkin pi(e) blizzard from DQ!

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    1. I just ate the most beautiful, green-frosted, star-shaped custard donut EVER.

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  3. When I had an office job and was in between projects, I used to spend an inordinate amount of time on wordreference.com forums answering questions about idioms from Spanish speakers. I found I was at a loss sometimes when it came to the "why" part

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    1. I'd never really thought about how strange our idioms are until I heard a segment on NPR about idioms from other countries that mean the same thing. I kept thinking, "How do you get from that literal meaning to that assumed meaning?!" You grow up hearing these, and just "getting it," but it's good to take a step back every once in a while to realize language is a very convoluted animal.

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