I'm just quibbling with the 'niggling' bit, as it makes it sound less important than I take the nitty-gritty to be.

I would quibble over 'niggling' details here. Niggling is for micromanagement, nitty-gritty is for the core, the gist of the matter, the really important stuff.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY TO ALL YOU MOTHERS OUT THERE!

Well, if weltanschauung is a view of the world as we think it should be, is there a word for how we think it actually is? My own weltanschauung is not very happy right now.

And, though it's not a rare word, I had to add weltanschauung to my spell-check dictionary. Harrumph!

A good strong word, I like it. One thing, however, is that it is only about being one-sided over things that could have other sides. One couldn't be tendentious about 2 + 2 = 4, could one?

Journalists today should learn this word. Then they could write about our proditory prior president.

I like the Occam's Razor-type quote from the professor, “If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong.” The article would have been improved for me by having an example or two of just what the problem looked like. Still, it's nice knowing that even after 5,000 years, there are new things t...

FWIW, my speculation is that the English 'gh' is a 16th century someone's approximation of the spelling of the sound of the Italian 'ge'.

I confess to going back and forth on the pronunciation of this one, probably because I don't come across it often and don't think I've ever actually used it, I'll use the pronunciation as given, or go for making the 'g' a ''dj'. Any thunks?

Pretty much the same meaning as onomatopoeia, but I think the word you're looking for is 'imitative'.

Well, I, for one, am surprised; this is not related to the embolus of embolism. That's from the ballein of things like hyperbole and abulia. Far out.

Resuscitation in the cinema often gets me. There someone is, on the brink of death, someone does some CPR, and bang!, they're up and at 'em, ready and rarin' to go. I do know movies aren't real, but sometimes it's a bit much, even for suspension of disbelief.

If only someone could come up with a stratagem for bringing lasting peace to the Middle East.

Simplistic, I know, but as Rodney King asked, "Can’t we all just get along?"

In case anyone's interested, the Russian prikhodit' does mean to come to or arrive, but it also carries the added nuance of 'on foot', 'walking'. If you drive, it would be 'priekhat'. There are entire textbooks written just for understanding the intricacies of Russian verbs of motion. They can be ve...

As with brunet, this is one of those words I tend to associate first and foremost with women. Meaning I think doyenne or brunette first, even when it's written doyen or brunet.