Results tagged “words”

For about ten years, Slate has had an intermittent series of articles that explain how to pronounce names of people who are in the news. As someone whose (first) name is frequently mispronounced, I can appreciate the effort. (For the record: I pronounce it like the word "anneal", used in glassmaking.)

Amusingly, the column has been running for so long that they've had the opportunity to offer more than one way to say "Pinochet", with the Chilean dictator having eluded earlier attempts at pronunciation. Due to Slate's weird archives, earlier must-hear words don't show up in that archive, including frequently-used conversation starters like Qatar and Abu Ghraib, and a host of others piggybacking under the also-excellent Explainer feature that is one of my Slate faves.

A few weeks ago, I asked the people who follow my Twitter account to describe the difference between lemons and limes. My immediate prompt was because I was trying to explain that some languages use the same word for both citrus fruits, and others only have a word for one or the other, and thus are forced to use descriptors to distinguish between which one is being specified.

But the responses I got back ranged from charming to insightful, and all demonstrated just how strongly lemons and limes affect our senses. Here's a sample of the responses from Twitter and Facebook.

The literalist:

• baffled: Easy: lemons are lemony and limes are more limey

The bitter-sweet battle:

• ericagee: Limes are a little bit sweeter and a lot bit tarter :).
• antichason: lemons have a bitter undertone to the sour, while limes are sweeter. Which is why limeade will always be superior to lemonade.
• choirshark: lemons vs. limes: lemons are rarely tasting bitter to me, lime do sometimes

The poets:

• freshelectrons: limes have a little taste of moonlight and silver in with the sunshine / citrus aromatics
• Wiley Wiggins: Lemons have a sweeter darker flavor, Limes are sharper and metallic, the sweetness is married closer to the acidity. The acid in lemons is fruitier.

A few charming responses:

• gwentown: Easy: limes are better. [I loved the blatantly opinionated response here.]
• danwolfgang: lemons are great for lemonade, limes are great for marinades. [This sounded like Dorothy Parker to me.]
• otherniceman: lemons }{, limes () [Obviously nerdy, but still somehow clearly correct.]

And then, those that were least literal and perhaps most evocative. These caught my eye because (at least as I read them) they seemed like totally unselfconscious responses based on how we perceive the taste and smell of these fruits.

• redmonk: limes taste rounder.
• JonathanDeamer: EASY. Limes taste more green.
• Harold Check: Lemons taste yellow. Limes taste green.

Thanks to everyone who responded. If you're looking for a scientific distinctions between the two species, you can consult your favorite reference materials to learn about Citrus aurantifolia or C. latifolia (limes) and Citrus limon (lemons). A quick Google search for comparisons between the two fruit will yield a large number of people saying that limes are just unripened lemons. These people are stupid and should learn from the wisdom of the folks I've quoted above.

Kevin Werbach, internet gadfly and all-around nice guy, wrote a student Note in the Harvard Law Review entitled Looking It Up: The Supreme Court's Use of Dictionaries in Statutory and Constitutional Interpretation. Since then, Eugene Volokh's discovered that it's become one of the most-cited Notes he could find, with over 100 academic citations. Especially impressive since one of its core arguments is against blindly accepting the authority of dictionaries. An outline:

This Paper argues that the Supreme Court should exercise greater sensitivity in its use of dictionaries. Part I demonstrates the increased prominence of dictionaries in Supreme Court opinions during the last several years. This shift is too substantial to ignore or dismiss as a coincidence; some underlying factors must explain the trend. Part II therefore situates the Court's use of dictionaries within a broader context of changed attitudes toward statutory interpretation and the role of judges. Dictionaries are not ideal tools; they provide a range of definitions that bear an imperfect relationship to context and meaning. The choice of the dictionary as an interpretive tool requires substantive decisions by judges, and introduces the antecedent assumptions of dictionary editors into the legal process. Part III suggests that these and other considerations gravely limit the value of dictionaries to statutory and constitutional interpretation, and that the Court's current unselfconscious attitude towards the reference books greatly exacerbates these problems. The paper concludes in Part IV with suggestions for more rigorous and more appropriate use of dictionaries.

I love dictionaries and the people who make them, but I'm glad that are strong arguments against their being pressed into duty as legal references.

I sure do love words. And even better, my friends do too. So they make great websites and books about it. Mark made Neologasm, which I am very partial to because it documents (among other things) the words we regularly make up around the office at Six Apart. I am very glad to spend my days in a workplace that enjoys wordplay. But that's not enough!

So, I return to the classics, Double-Tongued Word Wrester, the excellent word blog by Grant Barrett, noted lexicographer and author of the upcoming Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. In addition to his linguistic expertise, Grant was my original influence in learning how to become an expert on a subject by loudly and repeatedliy asserting one's own overwhelming authority on a topic until others can't help but acknowledge one's genius. Though this isn't a rare tactic in the technology industry, particularly in the niche which I inhabit, it came as a revelation to me that this technique could be so effective. Witness it for yourself in Grant's history of Ask MetaFilter answers!

But blogs have a lot more to give to the worlds of etymology: There's the concept of the snowclone, the trope of performing a selective search and replace on a familiar linguistic structure. Besides being a favorite method of titling blog posts, it's one of the few new words whose etymology is completely documented. Language Log is a great resource; Its history of covering the "many words for snow" myth that gave snowclones their name is well documented.

Of course, blogs have a long history of being obsessed with words. The blog that is responsible for the word "blog", as well as having most directly inspired me to start blogging, has had a peculiar etymological fixation for some time. Bloggers are the new neologists, if not the new etymologists.