Everything on the site is working OK for me. No problems. With regard to David Myer's posts above, another regular member we lost some years ago was Saparris, with whom I used to write 'Group Poems' (see Res Diversae). I don't know about Daniel Obertance – he is not in the List of Members, and there...

Most Americans say "th" when speaking of the German airline "Lufthansa" and I am OK with that. I suppose the "proper" pronunciation of "Neanderthal" also requires a "t" not a "th," but I don't feel like a caveman because I pronounce all the letters in the word. In the UK we pronounce "Lufthansa" wi...

Thanks a lot for the information. I suspected that this idiom is of recent origin. It seems to have caught on quickly.

Back in the day (A long while ago, especially at a time of which one has happy memories) This, as a complete expression (rather than "Back in the day when...") seems to be a fairly new idiom. I would be interested in any views about its use, and date and place of origin. Is it a specifically Britis...

'Avenue Road' (something of a tautology) and 'The Avenue' are very common street names. Don't you hate those ridiculous computer programs that ask for the street name and want the word 'street' or whatever in the next field and they offer all the alternatives the silly programmer could think of? Usu...

avenue From Latin via French. Originally 'approach' or 'way of approach', then 'approach road to a country house', then 'wide road lined with trees', then any wide street, then used randomly for the names of residential streets. Still used to mean 'approach' in a non-physical sense, e.g. 'avenue of...

cockeyed

Crooked, absurd, drunk, or having a squint.

It is, of course, more difficult to make the spaces as well as the letters symmetrical. The best I can do at present is the following:

No pay? God, pets! I spot Bateman. No tub, but on nametab tops I step. Dog, yap on!

You are invited to make up palindromic sentences, or palindromic combinations of sentences. Here are some of mine:

Raw fog of war.
Mac's top nurses run pot scam.
No, Seville's mad damsel lives on.
No parts or clever Arsenal bar togs, eh? He's got Rab Lane's rare velcro strap on.

Carolina doesn't qualify because it is not a commonzation, but a proper noun from a proper noun. Ditto for Dickensian . The meaning of the latter word hasn't changed, either. But Georgia , Georgian and Rabelaisian are included. (I was thinking of Dickensian in the sense of 'squalid, poverty-stricke...

Some other eponyms not in the list:

Carolina (from the Latin form of 'Charles', i.e. King Charles II)
cordwainer (from 'Cordoba')
Dickensian
landau (from the German city of that name)

sheepish

Looking embarrassed or ashamed.

Probably from the sense of 'submissive', like a sheep.

'Stand' in 'stand corrected' may be a copula, but I am quite sure that 'wage' in 'wage war' and 'throw' in 'throw a party' are ordinary transitive verbs, meaning 'conduct' and 'arrange' respectively. 'War' and 'party' are direct objects, not subject complements like 'fool' in 'I feel a fool' or 'nic...

It seems that cohort and exhort are etymologically unrelated to each other. But I wonder if one influenced the other at any point.

What is the correct grammatical analysis of "I stand corrected"? Is 'stand' here an intransitive verb with independent meaning, as in "I stand firm" or "I stood transfixed with fear"? Or is it merely a linking verb (copula), equivalent to "I am in a corrected state"? The latter explanation would mak...