I posted a sensible translation to this elsewhere - I forget where. It's a poem, and quite beautiful. I will now recreate it from memory, and, in the process, strip it of any beauty it may have originally held: "Do you remember? The current beating along the coast With our boat moving through t...

Heretics under the Inquisition were "protected" by a rule that only allowed a handful (three or four, if I remember correctly) tortures to be used in persuading them to see the evil of their ways. One was very similar to waterboarding, but it was applied much more vigorously. The others we...

Sure, they all roar: we just call it different things (back to language.) Most cats have a small repertoire of different vocalizations, and we are only now untangling their meanings. Lions roar very loudly, frequently, and in deep tones, and that's no accident: Besides being built large enough to ge...

Completely off the subject comes a flash from Florida to all of you anywhere north of the Gulf of Mexico: Take heart! The robins are headed north. A great flock came through my property last weekend, and there must be 100 here now, loafing on the ground in the rain and eating all my worms. Spring is...

So, Skinem, you prefer "duck tape," which was the original name and pronunciation for the product we now call "duct tape," thanks to improper usage? That transformation only took a decade or two!

That was not I. But if nobody else claims it, I shall, because it's a reasonably good joke.

I don't know that origin of the current meaning of sinister is that well known. I've heard several variations on it, some not even closely related to others. It seems obvious to me that the superstitious human mind would mark lefties as being wrong - maybe not quite monstrous, but wrong - and theref...

Equivocation - the same pay for men and women at any particular job.

Sinister - also from the French for "left"

"A sideways glance" can almost be contracted to "askance." All the sounds are in the right places, with the "gl" hardening to "k."

Any thoughts on that, Doc?

Getting back on track, I've never heard anyone on the East Coast of the U.S. say pernickety without the "s." If the the "s" has provenance going back over 110 years (longer, in fact, than the original existed without it,) is it being a bit persnickety to long for the older pronun...

Of course he is. Otherwise, he would be Voldequick or some such.

Isn't "Sean" the Gaelic equivalent of French "Jean" and English "John?" I've never heard that it was derived from a word meaning "old." Does this mean that John and Jean and Johann and all the other variations of the name originally meant "old?"

"Senescence" is another noun associated with the adjective, "senile." It is the act of aging, or (if I remember my botany) the state of a plant that is moribund after producing seed. I have also seen the back-formation of senescent (adj.) and even the verb "to sensesce."

I'm sorry I missed the earlier posts in this thread - the ones that actually dealt with "fishwife." Steve said his wife ate fish but didn't use foul language, which is good, because in that case he could never be hen-pecked.

Have you heard of the new movie coming out? ... Somebody steals Zeus' lightening bolt, and the kid is a descendant of the ancient Greek gods or something. Sounds right up my alley.

Actually, it sounds electrifying, Luke. Maybe there's a tie-in with Transformers.