Slava: You were supposed to be impressed by the clever way I wrote that in the case of Mexico, "overseas outsourcing" wouldn't be "littorally" correct. (Because there wouldn't be any "littoral zone", defined as the part of a sea, lake or intertidal zone that is close to...

A little bird tweeted in my ear that the word from which this suggested Good Word was derived is still as alive and well today as it was in the days of Augustus and Cicero.

Regarding today's GW, Dr. B. mentions as examples the "overseas outsourced" jobs that have moved to India, China, & Pakistan, adding that "Outsource overseas" would be more precise, but then that's two words and we are always in a hurry. "Outsource overseas" would s...

In the Arkansas Ozarks there's plenty of pumpkins around from which Jack-o-lanterns can be made. (Although it's easy to have too many. Of anything).

I've distinguished the two in a way that now makes me think it must be too simple to be correct: "Wither" is what my tomatoes on the vine do when they've not been watered often enough, while "whither" is a fancy-dancy way of conveying the concept of "wherever" in a mann...

I guess this is a response to Perry’s reaction to a reply I made to Philip—a twist I just noticed. Due to the lack of any specificity that I could detect in Philip’s initial post (“I am drowning in a sea of obligations and things I actually want to do...”) I had to at least consider the possibility ...

According to Diane Ackerman, ("The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us") 'Nano,'...applies to things one-billionth of a meter long. In nature that's the size of sea spray and smoke. A strand of hair is 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide, roomy enough to hold 100,000 perfectly machined carbon ...

"I need lessons in lifehacking."--Philip Hudson I live to serve: Become filthy rich so you can pay people to do distasteful things for you. Alternatively, start with https://zapier.com/blog/productivity-blogs/. One of them is a "Ridiculously Easy Trick"; the other is just ridicul...

I confess that whether "nano" is selected from among the 400 or so current entrants nominated to be Good Words of the Day is secondary to my reason for suggesting it. Once I read this passage from "The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us" ((c)Diane Ackerman; W.W. Norton & Compa...

I've frequently felt that another word with mental-graffiti potential is "Huff"; I can easily imagine 5th-graders fulfilling the teacher's instruction to produce an "illustration of its usage" by submitting a picture of a scowling, swarthy, hirsute, cigar-chomper, roaring away in...

It's not in the GW Dictionary, but recognition must be given to my 5th-grade English teacher, who instructed her students to "illustrate the use of the word", thereby giving more than one student an opportunity to submit a drawing of a angry woman with frizzled hair, at the wheel of what l...

Dr. G. notes that "blog" ...was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year in 2004.... which I will take as a given is correct, and join him in thanking Good Word editor Paul Ogden and subscriber Eleanora Konwaler for tossing it in the hat. More recently, according to Wikipedia, The American Diale...

One apparently being broadly described as "Italian ice cream", while the other is a mucilaginous result--often used in glue--of boiling down animal joints and hooves. Does either use have even the most tenuous relationship to the commercial product known in the states as Jell-O?

Preview: Re: caliphate I had concluded some time ago that "the pool is rather small", but, given this opportunity, felt compelled to point out that--contrary to the notion of the stereotypical "Arkie" as being an ignorant, moonshine-swilling redneck, living in a rural hamlet of t...

My friendly rival, Albert Skiles, and I feel it should be pointed out that of all the 50,000 Good Word subscribers, (some living in territories where English is not the predominately-spoken language in a hundred miles in any direction) we two—who live within 40 or so miles or so of each other in Nor...