I am sure that most of your readers will notice, as did I, your brief but partisan political commentary. This marks the first time I can remember you taking a political stand in the daily alphaDictionary posts, your otherwise neutral, non-biased posts notwithstanding.

C Freund

Today's Good Word email has two different spellings for the day:
Veteran's Day and Veterans Day. Which is correct? -cf

Not finding this word anywhere else, I made it up since it fit so perfectly where I used it in my book: ...the preceding paragraphs in this section really are leading, albeit circumventually (I just made that word up, as far as I can determine: circumvent slammed into eventually; it seems appropriat...

Mess Non-military readers may well be wondering why a “mess” is as associated with its military meaning. “Mess” refers to an area or facility where military personnel socialize and eat. According to Wikipedia, the root of mess is from the Old French mes, meaning portion of food, the original sense b...

I forwarded today's Good Word, prolegomenon (10 May (my 48th wedding anniversary)) to a friend who is a professional writer. She sent me back this "word": hapex legomenon. When I googled each part of this word pair separately, it always came up as the word pair together. Although this &quo...

Although fugacious is a new word to me, I still prefer a word that is more liltingly flowing and that is also in your Beautiful Words book: evanescence.

In the South we used to occasionally go frog gigging at night in the summer. I suppose when we were finished gigging, one could have said that we had gigged, although if an inquiry had been made by a game warden or whomever we would have said that we had been gigging and not that we had gigged. That...

I am sure that by now you have received numerous replies about your rare but nonetheless glaring in the ""In Play" for diapason. I am giving you the benefit of doubt and assuming a typo in suggesting Beethoven's 5th Symphony to be the choral..."Ode to Joy" which, as those as...

I enjoy your daily opuscularities.
(There! Now someone has ventured to use that derivative.)

I could be wrong, but methinks your math is a bit off. Millennial = 1,000 years. Bi = X2. Therefore, so far we have 2,000 years. Sesqui = one half more, which would be 2,000 + 1,000, which now = 3,000 years, not 2,500. I can see how you possibly derived the 2,500 number by applying the Sesqui to the...

I could not help but notice that In Play for today's Good Word included a fine example of a very recent Good Word, as I understand it: apophasis: "The real, unspoken gravamen of the charges brought against the professor was the way he dressed for class." This, for me, is a good way to rein...

The venerable Dr. Isaac Asimov had a knack for explaining things - many things, on a plethora of topics - in words that laymen could understand. In his book "Realm of Numbers" he discusses the numbers google and googleplex. As I recall, he described a googleplex thusly: If you tried to wri...

A couple of years ago I read an anecdote about Joshua Bell, perhaps the premiere cellist in the world today. One morning during rush hour he set up near a busy Washington, D.C. Metro (subway) exit and played on his $1M+ Stradivarius cello for about an hour, as a busker. It was amazing how many peopl...

My dad referred to a haircut as a tonsorialectomy. I still use it occasionally. - cf