There is a word or meme that pops up from time to time on social media: It is “Werifesteria”. Here is a cropped image of a typical post citing this “word”: Does it matter that the word doesn’t actually exist in any dictionary and that it is not in
Several years ago I watched a wonderful film called “Awakenings” which was based on the autobiographical book of the same title by Dr. Oliver Sacks. When I originally chose to watch the movie, I had little idea of the subject-matter. The story follows Dr Sacks (played by Robin Williams) working
Recently, a commercial has been shown over and over again, and each time I see it I find it increasingly disturbing. It is disturbing because it is misleading, panders to the pretentiousness of potential clients, uses incorrect terminology, objectifies women and youth, and is breathtaking in its disdain toward workers.
At first, I was going to use the idiomatic expression “sea-change”. Then I double checked its present meaning, which gave me pause. The expression goes back to William Shakespeare in ‘The Tempest’ ; specifically in the song ‘Full Fathom Five’. A supernatural spirit, Ariel, is singing to Ferdinand, the Prince of
Recently the news has latched onto a comment made in the United States’ political arena, and now the word “weird” seems to be everywhere. The word itself has an interesting pedigree. Most etymologies tend to move from the present and go backwards through time, but let’s take a different
Back in what we might consider a more “conservative” decade it was a Canadian who, in 1956, coined the word “psychedelic”. The orthography took some time to settle, and in its early years it was sometimes spelled “psychodelic”. No longer quite so popular a term (see n-gram chart below), the