WordFixx

Talking about family quirks, Anne came up with another interesting phrase.  She says her sister from Wisconsin says "a horse a piece" meaning "either way".  So it would be the equivalent of "six of one, half dozen of the other".   The first long explanation I saw for this was at Everything Summer Camp . It comes from a situation in a game where a player is trying to win a best-of-three match and each player has one win, so "one win apiece" eases into "a horse apiece".  This feels most likely to me. I can see a link back to a friendly (or not so friendly) game of bar dice where, in the final best-of-three showdown, if you lose the first game, it's "a horse against you" or "a horse on you", after which, if the other player wins the second game, you would clearly have "a horse apiece."   A lot of gambling games have the tokens or stakes nicknamed "horses". There's a bit of a time shift going...

Anne just mentioned a few interesting quirky phrases she and her sisters use. One is "bread and butter", used when two people are walking together and some obstacle comes up that will separate them -- just say "bread and butter" and it will be okay.  This would fall under phrases of superstition.  It's an incantation of sorts.  The idea is that bread and butter cannot be separated easily, so the two people walking will be safe from any misfortune.  In some reports, both people have to say it for it to have the desired effect. I had never heard of this usage, but I'm sure I have heard similar things, like "step on a crack, break your father's back," meant to keep quirky influences away. She says she has used it most of her life, and still thinks it in her head sometimes when a lamp post or some other obstacle comes up.  Wikipedia mentions it , without much history. Hours later: Just now, we took a trip to target to buy some new sizes of luggage ...

I was contemplating how many odd short words that I use are the names of fish, so I thought I would put together a list.  Common short fish names for word games (less than 8 letters), from this Wikipedia page . I can't say these will all be accepted by every game or dictionary, but they are worth knowing to expand your word power.  Some are familiar to local areas, where others are widely known around the world.  There are variations on some of these, and compound names (yellowfin tuna, sailfin silverside, etc), and many longer names.  There are also thousands of genus names for fish (like alosa, which includes shads, alewife and a herring or two) but it's hard to say how many of those are ever used on their own.   alewife + anchovy *+ ayu % bangus % barb +- barbel + barfish % bass *+- basslet % batfish + betta + bichir % bigeye blenny + boafish % boga % bonito + bowfin boxfish bream + brill brotula % burbot buri % candiru % capelin carp + catfish *+ catla % cha...

An interesting article came up today on phys.org about how new words reach the mainstream (or fail to do so) from social media. The basic premise: "Language evolves within a social context and variations in a language are always in competition with each other. In everyday language, words are constantly being created, but not all these words persist." The examples are French words, but the data should apply to any language.  A well-placed creator at the center of a large network is more likely to get a new word across the finish line to acceptability, compared to people on the fringes using it.  No surprise here, but it was interesting to see the charts and how they broke down the analysis.  They saw three windows of 6 to 18 months each, where the word is trending, then peaking, and after that it either stays at the peak or falls back into obscurity. This wasn't based on just asking a few people.  The team analyzed "650 million tweets written in French between 2012 a...