Did you know this?

prescience / PRESH-ee-unss / noun

foreknowledge of events: 

a : divine omniscience

b : human anticipation of the course of events : foresight

If you know the origin of "science," you already know half the story of "prescience." "Science" comes from the Latin verb "scire," which means "to know" and which is the source of many English words ("conscience," "conscious," and "omniscience," just to name a few). "Prescience" comes from the Latin verb "praescire," which means "to know beforehand." "Praescire" joins the verb "scire" with the prefix "prae-," a predecessor of "pre-." A lesser-known "scire"-derived word is "nescience." "Nescience" means "ignorance" and comes from "scire" plus "ne-," which means "not" in Latin.

-- Merriam-Webster.com

Three words that are fun to say

frangible \FRAN-juh-buhl\, adjective:

Capable of being broken; brittle; fragile; easily broken.

Frangible ultimately derives from Latin frangere, "to break."

tarradiddle \tair-uh-DID-uhl\, noun;
also taradiddle:

1. A petty falsehood; a fib.
2. Pretentious nonsense.

Tarradiddle is of unknown origin.

effulgence \ ih-FULL-junss\ noun

radiant splendor : brilliance

Effulgence derives from the Latin verb "fulgēre," which means "to shine."

Squad helps dog bite victim

Classic newspaper headlines:

“Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,”

“MacArthur Flies Back to Front”

“Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans” 

“Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim"

“Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge”

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines, Ben Zimmer writes in The New York Times. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

Zimmer has more:

“McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers”

“British Left Waffles on Falklands”

“Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts”

How do we explain crash blossoms?

Zimmer: Nouns that can be misconstrued as verbs and vice versa are, in fact, the hallmarks of the crash blossom. English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, “-s.” In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of “to be” — robbing the reader of crucial context. If that A.P. headline had read “McDonald’s Fries Are the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers,” there would have been no crash blossom for our enjoyment.

Grammar police: it's important

its and it’s

 
The secret here is that pronouns don’t take “apostrophe plus S” to make them possessive. Decide whether you can change the “apostrophe plus S” to “is.” (Example – It’s going to be a long time before the tech comes, so the copy machine is going to keep spitting out its paper regularly.) Since you could say “It is going to be a long time...” you know the apostrophe form is correct. But you wouldn’t want to say “...spitting out it is paper regularly.” Pronouns don’t take “apostrophe plus S” to form the possessive: That is [my, your, her, his, its, their, our] book. Even when shifting a sentence to a little different form, NONE of them use the apostrophe: The book is [mine, yours, hers, his, its, theirs, ours].

-- MoneyInstructor.com

How Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain

Rob Velella at The American Literary Blog provides more details of the birth of the pen name "Mark Twain:"

A man named Samuel L. Clemens traveled west with his brother, across the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains, and stopping in the territory of Nevada, where he got a job as a miner. That role didn't work out for him and, instead, he turned to the local newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.

He achieved some notoriety there, later writing to his mother somewhat tongue-in-cheek as having "the widest reputation" possible on the frontier. He noted, "If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond," he might even make money off it. "And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory." Such was Clemens's humor.

In fact, some of his writing for the Enterprise was humor rather than pure journalism. Such was the case for its February 3, 1863 issue, when one of those articles by Clemens was signed, inexplicably, with a pseudonym. Though Samuel Clemens was 28 years old, some call this the birthday of "Mark Twain."

The name comes from the call made by leadsmen aboard riverboats (a role Clemens held at one point), and most scholars agree this was the intended reference. However, in 1874, Clemens wrote a letter offering his own explanation. He claims that he borrowed the name from a senior boat pilot named Isaiah Sellers, who himself used the name when he wrote for the Picayune, a newspaper in New Orleans. He stopped using the name when Clemens made fun of him for it. Sellers died in 1863 and, perhaps to make amends, Clemens took it over, noting that Sellers didn't need it anymore. In fact, the story doesn't check out; Sellers was still very much alive when Clemens adopted the name "Mark Twain," and no articles under that name existed in the New Orleans paper.

Another story claims that Clemens used to order two drinks at once while at the taverns out west. He would ask that both ("twain") be "marked" on his bar tab. In theory, then, he would go to the bar, hold up two fingers, and ask the bartender to "mark twain." 

There's a bathroom on the right

When she was a child, the American writer Sylvia Wright recalled, her mother read aloud to her from "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," and one of her favorite poems began, as she remembered:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O'Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

The actual fourth line is, "And laid him on the green."

In an essay in 1954, "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," Wright  explained the need for a new term. "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original."

Among the more well-known mondegreens:

• Surely Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life ("Surely goodness and mercy…" from Psalm 23)
• Gladly, the cross-eyed bear(from the line in the hymn, "Keep Thou My Way" ("Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear")
• 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy (from a lyric in the song "Purple Haze", by Jimi Hendrix: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky").

And, of course ...

There's a bathroom on the right (the line at the end of each verse of "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival: "There's a bad moon on the rise") 

And a few more:

• "The girl with colitis goes by." (Real lyric: "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes," Beatles)
• "Olive, the other reindeer." (Real lyric: "All of the other reindeer.")
• "The ants are my friends, they're blowing in the wind." (Real lyric: "The answer is blowing in the wind," Bob Dylan.)
• "There's a wino down the road." (Real lyric: "And as we wind on down the road," Led Zeppelin.)
• "In a glob of Velveeta, honey." (Real lyric: "In-A-Gadda Da Vida," a.k.a., "In the garden of Eden," Iron Butterfly.)

The rubric of this blog is The Writer

And it is of the rubric of blogs. But it is not red. (I hope, however, that it is read.)

rubric / ru-brik / noun

1. A title or heading, the name of something, especially the name of a category.  
2. A direction for the conduct of services in a liturgical text, often distinguished from the text by red print.  
3. Any red-letter entry in a diary, on a calendar, etc.

From Dr. Goodword:

Rubric comes with a natural adjective, rubrical, but all its other relatives mean "red" in some sense: ruby, rubescent, rubeola. It comes in handy when talking about categories of things: "Carlton, I would say that charging me 30 percent on a personal loan until payday would fall under the rubric of usury." Introduce it whenever you are talking about the name of something: "Marian Kine has been married so many times it almost falls under the rubric of polygamy."

History: Rubric is another snipped from Latin, this time rubrica "red chalk". Rubrica was derived from ruber "red", and went on to become rubrica in Spanish and Portuguese, rubrik in German, Danish, and Swedish, and rubriek in Dutch. Its meaning shifted to "heading" because the headings of the liturgical texts in the Catholic Church have traditionally been printed in red. Those headings came to be referred to as "the reds" in Latin and French. Latin inherited it from Proto-Indo-European reudh- "red", for some reason changing the DH to B in rubrica. We would have expected DH to become F in Latin, and so it does in rufus "red-haired", a word that also became a common name in Rome. The Proto-Indo-European root for "red" also came to English via its Germanic roots as ruddy, converting the DH to D, just as we would expect.