"Factitious" has found its way into the psychiatric vocabulary. According to the Cleveland Clinic, "Factitious Disorder is a mental disorder in which a person acts as if he or she has a physical or mental illness when, in fact, he or she has consciously created their symptoms. The nam...

No discussion of "Jesuitical" would be complete without a discussion of "casuistry" because it was the alleged misapplication of casuistry by the Jesuits which brought about the pejorative "Jesuitical." Cause and effect. According to Wikipedia (consistent with other sou...

"Within the curtilage" is a legal expression. According to the Legal Information Institute of Cornell University Law School: Curtilage includes the area immediately surrounding a dwelling, and it counts as part of the home for many legal purposes, including searches and many self-defense l...

Having nothing to do with egregious, but of interest to word lovers, color-coded maps tracing word origins in Europe:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/fascinati ... 10187.html

The Battle of the Frogs and Mice (just a typewritten page or two) is available online here: (http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/homer/frogmice.htm) Sharing a laugh with the ancient Greeks in The Battle of the Frogs and Mice brings me closer to them than the classics it mocks. I had to laugh when a mou...

The Temperance Ladies were an intemperate lot, and "rambunctious" is a very intemperate word. Google Ngram Viewer shows usage of "rambunctious" slowly beginning to take off in appx. 1880 with notable surges at the outset of WWII and the late sixties. Correlation with periods of s...

Thanks. Perry. I straggle in from the desert, apocrypha notebook in hand.

"One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back."

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

I suspect the "is" is not extra, cal copse, but two other words are missing from the beginning of the sentence: "The reason I visit so seldom, mother, is because...."

Just as the good doc says, despite its sound, the word "debride" has nothing to do with love, but often with horrific war wounds. Having read probably hundreds of Vietnam War medical reports routinely describing gun shot wounds ("GSW") being debrided, and trying to imagine in my ...

In the most significant case of my legal career I defended a county ordinance against a claim of preemption by state law, losing on that particular issue, but ultimately winning the case on other grounds after two trials, two trips to the court of administrative appeals, two trips to the state appel...

To Perry: "Very interesting!" To cal_copse: Here's my continuation: As she confronted the daunting odds, the solution came to Jiggles in a flash. Relying on her degree in Classics (First Honors, Cambridge class of 1915) she would take a page from the Odyssey to evade the Hun. It was the re...

Henry: Hear them down in Soho square, Dropping "h's" everywhere. Speaking English anyway they like. You sir, did you go to school? Man: Wadaya tike me for, a fool? Henry: No one taught him 'take' instead of 'tike! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? For a dip into the ...

बहुत ही रोचक!
Bahuta hī rōcaka!

P.S. Turbaned emoticon unavailable.

Knowing next to nothing about Hindi, I thought I would take the opportunity to learn just a little bit more than nothing: specifically, "The most common mood in Hindi is the indicative mood, which is used to indicate statements about facts or beliefs, etc." (http://hindilanguage.info/hindi...