It seems that people nowadays think till is a contraction of until, and so they want to put in that apostrophe (which then turns into a single quote and really makes them look stupid), but the older word is till, until was a later polysyllabic addition to the language. Nothing wrong with that, of course—add all the words you want—but don’t lose sight of the perfectly adequate words we already have.

And for the love of Pete, don’t put that “dumb’ quote in front and make yourself really look like an idiot.

Sesquipedalian. It means a foot-and-a-half long, and the dictionary goes on to say, jocularly used to describe long words. So it’s perfect in the post.

The word was freaking, and from the tongue of an older person, it might have carried with it the cachet of obscenity, but I don’t think the boy intended it to euphemize anything; it was just an expression he had heard and something he commonly used.

Now, I’m from ‘that younger generation’ where even using the original word would not have shocked, but I can understand how an old person might be shocked even by the substitution, but these neighbors were younger than me! So I’m left wondering, what planet did they grow up on? It’s not like you could watch a full night of TV and not come across words like that. But these people went so far as to ban my friend’s child from playing with theirs! Talk about overreacting!

People like this scare me because too much of the violence in this world comes from this kind of overreaction to words. I’ve found that when people are too squeamish for words, they rarely are too squeamish for actions.

Turns out it’s an entirely invented word, and we have Horace Walpole to thank for it. On learning that, I became curious if he were any relation to Robert Walpole, the famous British Prime Minister, and yes, he was the youngest son of Sir Robert.

He took the root of the word from the title of an old Middle Eastern fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, which turns out to be an old name for Sri Lanka, which was also once known as Ceylon.

Walpole described his coinage in a letter to a friend, saying,

as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of….

And now, just like the princes of Serendip, so have I.

The French-speaking Normans and the German-speaking Anglo-Saxons essentially mulled together to complete languages, and in so doing gave English a superfluity of words for common things. Where most languages would have one word for common animals, English had two, and the separation of the two original groups of speakers led to the words being applied to the animals in different ways. The Anglo-Saxon-speaking commoners took care of the animals, while the French speaking nobles usually only dealt with the animals as food. Thus in English the French word for cow became the word for the meat that is eaten. In English we don’t eat cow, we eat beef, but in most other languages, they eat cow. We don’t eat pig, we eat pork. We don’t eat deer, we eat venison. But the food animals that came along after the languages combined don’t have this dichotomy. When it comes to eating chickens, we just eat chicken.

Oh, yes. And wouldn’t it be nice if the other thought in the BR post (that laws could be written in simple and concise language) were implemented in our own country? Perhaps the latest thousand-page resolution could then be whittled down to, say, nine hundred and sixty?

I always loved them as a child. If you were like me, then you practiced them till you could say them clearly.

Here’s a post about tongue twisters in one of my favorite blogs, Language Log.