Good question

1. Is it good if a vacuum really sucks?

2. Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?

3. If a word is misspelled in the dictionary, how would we ever know?

4. If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?

5. Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?

6. Why does "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing?

7. Why does "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing?

8. Why do "tug" boats push their barges?

9. Why do we sing "Take me out to the ball game" when we are already there?

10. Why are they called " stands" when they are made for sitting?

11. Why is it called "after dark" when it really is "after light"?

12. Doesn't "expecting the unexpected" make the unexpected expected?

13. Why are a "wise man" and a "wise guy" opposites?

14. Why do "overlook" and "oversee" mean opposite things?

15. Why is "phonics" not spelled the way it sounds?

16. If work is so terrific, why do they have to pay you to do it?

17. If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?

18. If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

19. If you are cross-eyed and have dyslexia, can you read all right?

20. Why is bra singular and panties plural?

21. Why do you press harder on the buttons of a remote control when you know the batteries are dead?

22. Why do we put suits in garment bags and garments in a suitcase?

23. How come abbreviated is such a long word?
24. Why do we wash bath towels? Aren't we clean when we use them?

25. Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?

26. Why do they call it a TV set when you only have one?

27. Christmas - What other time of the year do you sit in front of a dead tree and eat candy out of your socks?

28. Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway ?

Our press at work

Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
"(Removes words 'and at times has had difficulty paying his mortgage,' paragraph 7; removes 'he did not make payments on a $100,000-plus student loan' and instead states 'he did not pay down the balance of a $100,000-plus student loan,' paragraph 10; removes 'he was caught up in an Internal Revenue Service Investigation' and instead states 'his name surfaced in an Internal Revenue Service investigation,' paragraph 12; removes 'voted against Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's Supreme Court nominee' and instead states 'opposed President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor,' paragraph 41; removes 'voted against Obama's healthcare overhaul' and instead states 'opposed Obama's healthcare overhaul,' paragraph 41)"--Reuters (corrections to a hit piece on Sen. Marco Rubio), Jan. 26

-- Best of The Web Today

Do you have a knack for writing?

Or is it all a trick?

A knack, the linguist Robert Beard writes, is a special, inexplicable skill or talent for carrying out a specific action.

That's the noun. There are other forms, he says, of which I have not been familiar.

The verb knack means "to crack, to make the noise of cracking," reflecting the original meaning of knack, the noun. Knacker "something that makes a sharp cracking sound," bears the same meaning. Knick-knack once meant "clatter," the alternation of knicking and knacking sounds. It followed the noun knack to its second historical meaning, "a trick" before ending up with its current sense, "a trinket, gimcrack, kickshaw."

Well, I knew knick-knack. I've never heard of kickshaw.

Knack has a long and curious past, the good doctor informs. It started out around 1380 meaning a cracking sound. This is confirmed by its cousins in other Germanic languages, knacken "to crack" and Norwegian knake "crack." (We also find Gaelic cnac with the same meaning.) For some unknown reason, by the time it reached the middle of the 16th century that meaning had given way to "deception, trick." Probably along the lines of crack shifting its meaning to "snide remark." The sense of "special talent" was first recorded in the 1580s, showing that "trick" took little time to be interpreted as a "special talent."

Knack, I'm going to suggest, is "woody."

The stories your mind tells

Narrative coherence

Humans love stories, Jason Gots writes. In fact, in some fundamental sense, we need them.

Cognitive science has long recognized narrative as a basic organizing principle of memory. From early childhood, we tell ourselves stories about our actions and experiences. Accuracy is not the main objective – coherence is. If necessary, our minds will invent things that never happened, people who don't exist, simply to hold the narrative together. How often have you had a fierce disagreement with a partner or sibling over who gave you that Three Tenors CD or which of you made the pathetic clay reindeer Christmas ornament? How can two eyewitnesses at a trial be absolutely convinced of two conflicting accounts of the same events.

This tendency to confabulate – to fill in the gaps of memory with plausible inventions that preserve narrative continuity – is most pronounced in patients with significant memory loss, or in laboratory tests with participants who have had the connection cut between the left and right hemispheres of their brain (a procedure that, surprisingly enough, rarely results in death or significant impairment of function). Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of Who's in Charge?, has performed countless experiments with split-brain participants. They have revealed a function of the left hemisphere called 'the Interpreter,' which jumps in to make sense of memories, when it has no direct access to those memories or the context in which they were made.

Lovers of film and literature may react with suspicion to any attempt at neurocognitive analysis of their passions.

This is misguided, says Gazzaniga – understanding our hardwired need for narrative coherence doesn't diminish the aesthetic power of a great story – nor will it enable us anytime soon to program computers to write like William Blake. But it may help to explain what's going on when we are mesmerized or stunned by a novel or the latest Matt Damon flick.

Gazzaniga suspects that narrative coherence helps us to navigate the world – to know where we're coming from and where we're headed. It tells us where to place our trust and why. One reason we may love fiction, he says, is that it enables us to find our bearings in possible future realities, or to make better sense of our own past experiences. What stories give us, in the end, isreassurance. And as childish as it may seem, that sense of security – that coherent sense of self – is essential to our survival.

That Matt Damon, some cool dude. 

Why didn't Dickens explode?

"It’s a wonder Charles Dickens didn’t explode and perish long before his death in 1870, at age 58. Quite apart from the act of composing his novels, he was a whirlwind, living a life that is nearly unmatched in its vigor. He had one entire career as a magazine editor, another as an actor and manager of theatrical productions, still another as a philanthropist and social reformer. The record of his private engagements alone — dinners, outings, peregrinations with his entourage of family and friends — is exhausting to read. The novels stand out against the backdrop of hundreds of other compositions, all of them written against tight deadlines.

"Dickens’s energy, which he made no effort to husband until he was nearly dead, was inexplicable. Call it metabolic if you like. Perhaps it was a reaction to the uncertainties of his childhood and the shame of his days as a child laborer, when he knew that as a precocious young entertainer he was already a spectacle well worth observing.

"He was driven by gargantuan emotions, and the ferocious will needed to keep them in check, to release them in the creation of characters he loved more than some of his children. He could drive himself to anguished tears while writing the death of Little Nell, in “The Old Curiosity Shop.” And yet he could also coldly disown anyone who sided with his wife, Catherine, when they separated, including his namesake son.

"Even Dickens didn’t understand his energy. He grasped that there was a wildness in him, and so did nearly everyone who knew him. When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine — Dickens explained that there were two people inside him, 'one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.'"

-- Verlyn Linkenborg

What's on the Times' mind

The New York Times is often accused of being liberal. Do you think? Here's what it offered online today "above the fold," i.e., without scrolling:

CAMPAIGN STOPS
What’s Race Got to Do With It?
By LEE SIEGEL
Mitt Romney is ahead because he is the whitest white man to run for president in years.

EDITORIAL
What They Don’t Want to Talk About
Mitt Romney and the Republican Party fear talking about income inequality in the campaign.

One Percent, Many Variations
By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBERT GEBELOFF
The members of the 1 percent, such as Adam Katz, are diverse, especially in where they live, what they believe politically and just how rich they really are.

Boehner Faces Restive G.O.P. and White House Attacks
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
In the new session of Congresss, Speaker John A. Boehner’s challenge is not only to corral his party but also to keep its majority and fend off attacks by President Obama.

Theology Feeds Christian Unease With Romney
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Basic differences about Scripture and the nature of God leads many Christians to conclude that Mormons, including Mitt Romney, cannot be considered Christian.

Simple rules for writing well

The Economist Style Guide, largely the work of editor John Grimond, is helpful, sensible, and refreshingly unstuffy, blogger Richard Nordquist writes. In other words, it heeds its own advice.

That good advice first shows up in the introduction, which offers eight precepts for keeping our readers engaged.

Catch the attention of the reader.Then get straight into the article. Do not spend several sentences clearing your throat, setting the scene or sketching in the background. 

Read through your writing several times.
Edit it ruthlessly, whether by cutting or polishing or sharpening, on each occasion. . . . Nothing is to be gained by resorting to orotundities and grandiloquence, still less by calling on clichés and vogue expressions. Unadorned, unfancy prose is usually all you need. 

Do not be stuffy.
Use the language of everyday speech, not that of spokesmen, lawyers or bureaucrats. . . . Pomposity and long-windedness tend to obscure meaning, or reveal the lack of it: strip them away in favour of plain words. 

Do not be hectoring or arrogant.
Those who disagree with you are not necessarily stupid or insane. Nobody needs to be described as silly: let your analysis show that he is. 

Do not be too pleased with yourself.
Don’t boast of your own cleverness by telling readers that you correctly predicted something or that you have a scoop. You are more likely to bore or irritate them than to impress them. 

Do not be too chatty.
Surprise, surprise is more irritating than informative. So is Ho, ho and, in the middle of a sentence, wait for it, etc. 

Do not be too didactic.
If too many sentences begin Compare, Consider, Expect, Imagine, Look at, Note, Prepare for, Remember or Take, readers will think they are reading a textbook (or, indeed, a style book). 

Do your best to be lucid.
(“I see but one rule: to be clear,” Stendhal) Simple sentences help. Keep complicated constructions and gimmicks to a minimum. . . . Clear thinking is the key to clear writing.