WordFixx

Here is another case where two words differ in American/British meaning based on an extra E: STORY and STOREY. You can tell a STORY, it's a piece of narration or fiction, or a news story.  I don't normally think of it as a verb, but it can be.  I would normally say I was telling a STORY, but I could be STORYING.  Having finished the STORY, I suppose I am all STORIED out.  But, STORIED fits as an adjective too: if many stories have been told about you, you have lived a STORIED life. STOREY is a floor in a house, and to make matters a little more complex, in the British Isles, what we call the first floor (Am) is the ground floor and our second floor is their first storey (floor).  A taller building could have multiple STOREYS.  Merriam-Webster says that this STOREY is just a less common version of STORY, but it always felt to me like a specifically British version.  Cambridge has STOREYED, which would be used as an adjective, as in "a three-storeyed ho...

When swiping words, I usually tell Anne that "STY is for pigs and STYE is in your eye."  Of course, it's not as simple as that. Apparently, it is not incorrect to use STY for the pimple-like blemish on the eyelid. What's interesting is how many other conjugations there are, which I never thought of.  As for the pig STY , it can be used as a verb, so you can STY the animals, whistle while you are STYING them, and when you're done they have all been STIED.  And more than one are STIES. For the plural of the swelling, both STIES and STYES appear to be valid. The animal pen STY comes from Old English _stig_ with the same meaning, going back to at least the 12th century. The bump on the eyelid comes from Old English _stigend_ from _stigan_ (to rise or go up), which is a cousin to the word that became STAIR.  Oddly. "Sty." Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sty. Accessed 24 Dec 2024.

One common series of words that comes up in word games is ANT, ANTE, ANTI.   ANT is a small insect we're all familiar with. ANTE is a wager placed before cards are dealt.  It's an interesting word since it also appears as a verb with a helper word: ANTE UP.  Which leads to the expression "up the ANTE," meaning to raise the stakes.  As a verb, you can be ANTEING.  After placing that bet (or changing the stakes) you have ANTED (prounced "anteed").   As a Latin word, "ante" simply means before, and as such it occurs as a prefix in many words like antediluvian: "before the Flood". ANTI is an odd one.  It's just the common prefix ANTI-, meaning "opposite of", used on its own, like taking an ANTACID to fight acid in your throat.  You can be ANTI crime, which is slightly different than an anti-crime bill.  A fun example from MW is "she is ANTI anything fun," meaning opposed to anything fun.  These all just seem so clunky....

Sometimes when rushing through a puzzle app, swiping words so quickly, the actual words can become a blur.  I am used to telling Anne about alternate American/English versions of words, like COLOR (Am) vs COLOUR (Eng) and NITER (Am) vs NITRE (Eng).  So I got into a blur where I ended up thinking BYRE and BIER were the same word, just different dialect spellings. But no, a BYRE is a shed for a cow, and a BIER is a typically wooden platform for carrying the dead.  So, if you have cattle, you can get them into the BYRE, but if you have a corpse or coffin to carry to a gravesite, a BIER would be the thing. In German, BIER is just BEER. And while swiping those letters, I misspelled BIER as BRIE, which is a soft spreadable cheese, like cream cheese.  I can't remember the last time I actually had some, but I seem to recall it looked like cream cheese but tasted skunky and awful.

It's easy to overlook algae, the single-celled plants that are at the bottom of most food chains.  When we do see them at all, they are often just green slime on the rocks in a stream.  But there are tens of thousands of varieties including some of the largest seaweed on Earth. The word is Latin and would be expected to have all the usual endings.  So ALGE or ALGA is a single one of these cells, ALGAE is the whole colony, and all these things are ALGAL life forms.  There is technically a plural ALGAS as well, but it sounds like a more modern "let's not use Latin" variation from folks who don't like -AE endings.  Like the modern "octopuses" for people who forget it was "octopi" when we were growing up. Chemicals to kill ALGAE are ALGICIDES, they are ALGICIDAL.  Things are like algae but are not technically algae are called ALGOID.  And a viscous substance that can be extracted from brown algae is ALGIN -- it is used as a thickener in foods and p...

ULNA is one of the bones in your arm.  It's the thinner and longer bone opposite the thumb.  When talking about it clinically, ULNAR means "of or around the Ulna".  And more than one are ULNAE.  Those are all classic Latin word endings. A quick shift of letters gives LUNA (the Moon), and if you're talking about the Moon, those things are LUNAR features.  The superstitious link between the full moon and strange human behavior leads to LUNACY (behavior caused by the Moon) and being a downright LUNATIC (a person supposedly stricken by LUNAR impulses).  A full cycle of the moon (a month) is a LUNATION. I thought that LUNE word be another word for lunation (month), but it's actually from geometry: a specific curve between two circular arcs, as one circle has a greater diameter than the other the result is shaped like a crescent Moon.  A Moon-shaped object is LUNATE, including a specific bone in your wrist. Note that Luna is a Latin name for our Moon, so it ...

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in high school more than 40 years ago, and always admired the way D&D could pull in material from all know mythologies and tap into the history of high fantasy literature, from the Lord of the Rings to the old Conan novels. While I don't expect every phrase from this rich (but strange) heritage to show up in every dictionary, one huge pet peeve of mine is that the word GEAS is not in the Scrabble dictionary or any dictionary used by any online games I play.  Heck, you can always find ROCS and LICHES and ghosts and goblins in modern games.  But never GEAS. GEAS comes from the Irish, through Scottish to English.  A GEAS is an unwilling quest, which can also be conveyed as a taboo, or the curse that will be bestowed upon you for breaking a taboo.  If you take on a quest of your own free will, that's one thing.  But if a demigod gives you a GEAS to walk to the ends of the earth, you're in for a world of pain. Wikipedia has ...

This will be another quick case of extending a word by adding letters progressively.  I like how this batch crosses a variety of sciences: An ION is any atom with a charge due to having excess or missing electrons.  If missing an electron, it will be a positive ion.  If it has an extra electron to share, it will be a negative ion.  Table salt is made up of a positive sodium (Na+) and a negative chlorine (Cl-) ion.  (In the simplest form, or when in solution in water.)  That is basic chemistry. Now a PION is a subatomic particle, coming from physics.  The name is shortened from pi-meson.  The exact nature of this particle can be found here .  For our purposes, it's just a useful word to know in Scrabble or other games. Next in line is the PRION, which comes from biology .  Believe it or not, there are infectious particles that are smaller than bacteria, even smaller than viruses ... PRIONS are simply misfolded mutant proteins that can cau...

In word games, it often makes sense to start with a small word and look for progressively longer words with the same letters.  Here is on that was bouncing around in my head this weekend. SOL is the sun, the center of the SOLAR System. SOLE is either the only item, or a fish.  Of course, acting as the SOLE participant means going SOLO.  This can also apply to a musical part, where you break off from the rest of the band and do your own thing: playing a SOLO. From SOLE we can insert a V to get SOLVE.  This word has some interesting branches.  It could mean coming up with the answer to a problem, SOLVING the problem.  That answer is the SOLUTION.   What's interesting about SOLVE and SOLUTION is that they also applies to mixing something into a liquid.  You DISSOLVE salt into water, for example, in which case the salt (the SOLUTE) is SOLUBLE in the water (the SOLVENT), and the resulting mix is the SOLUTION.   This just feels like an odd parallel...

As I came to see DEUCE and DUCE more frequently in the word games we play, I thought they were just two spellings of the same word -- maybe one was American English and the other was British -- but they are not even close.  A DEUCE is a two, or specifically the face of a die that shows two spots.  It does not seem to apply generally to a pair of something, as you would never say a deuce of shoes or a deuce of daisies.   Another set of expressions uses "deuce" as the devil, as in "there's the deuce to pay," suggesting a lot of trouble is coming.  I have also heard, "to the deuce with you."  Deuce = Devil in these cases. A less common usage is for "deuce" to mean something remarkable, as in "a deuce of a situation."  Merriam Webster's definition 3b is: "something notable of its kind", and their example is: "a deuce of a mess."  This fits with deuce as the devil.  It's not unheard of to say "a devil of ...

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...

On the radio on the way home a few nights ago, we had Mark Thompson filling in for Tim Conway Jr, and the show came back from a commercial break with an mellow old-school rap song intro, and he improvised his return with "Yo, yo, yo!" ... and then immediately got self-conscious about it. It turned into an actual linguistic discussion about where "Yo!" came from and where it's at today.  He felt it was an 80s or 90s thing.  It was never really a replacement for "Hello," but technically an interjection, and specifically used to get someone's attention. The other guys at the station felt it was outdated and confrontational.  Oddly, they might still use it to call attention to something, or to show surprise at something, but they would never use it in text messaging.  Or they would find it comically lame when older people used it in a text.  I thought it was interesting that usage can be so specific that a word leaves different impressions depending on...

New words are always appearing, but most of them disappear before ever making it into a proper dictionary.  Each individual has their own unique overall set of words and pronunciations, known as their "idiolect".  The next step above that is how small groups of people who get together regularly may share a few unique phrases within that group, but when they try to speak to people outside the group, those phrases will fall flat.  With our hyper-connected world, there are so many layers of language, it gets confusing. I'm regularly surprised that none of the word games we've tried will take NOOB or DERP.  I have been hearing people calling each other noobs for 5-10 years now, or saying "derp" as a sort of "oops", and calling things "derpy."  I suppose this is mostly in the realm of video gaming, but it spilled over into regular conversations a while ago. An interesting case that's currently developing is YEET.  I first heard it while pl...

After watching more word history videos and reading more articles, I have had this phrase stuck in my head all week long: "How do you get a clowder of cats from a chaos of kittens?" There are a lot of bizarre names for groups of animals (and people) in English.  Most of us have heard of a FLOCK of sheep or birds, a SWARM of bees, or a SCHOOL of fish.  Maybe you've heard of a MURDER of crows.  But believe me, this list goes on and on (and on), with weird and wild phrases that come as go as language evolves.  Here's a good overview video from Rob Words . One of the earliest big lists of these can be found in "The Book of Saint Albans" from 1486.  It was one of those gentleman's guidebooks that have been with us for centuries.  Here is an edition from the Gutenberg Project - you can get to the list by doing a text search for "Swannys", just after the halfway point in the document.  This list has extremely antiquated spellings, but some of the col...

There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not.  A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it.  I tried explaining it to Anne.  It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds."  It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here .  "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled.   It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong.  Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview.  I have been enjoy...

Sometimes while resting, by brain feeds me word exercises.  Apparently, relaxation is not an option in there.  So I roll with it.  I will often do word unscrambles in my head: mostly 4 or 5 letter words, so if I see one of those in a puzzle, I can rattle off all the words within it. A different exercise which is good not just for unscramblers, but also for Scrabble (and related apps), is to pick the end of a word and run from A to Z finding all valid words.  So, for "-AR", it would go like this, with real words in uppercase: BAR CAR dar EAR FAR GAR har iar JAR kar lar MAR nar OAR PAR rar sar TAR uar var WAR xar yar zar.   It's funny how the mind spins off related items along the way.  I would almost certainly hear CHAR and TSAR in between the 3-letter words, and would probably insert BRA after BAR since it uses the same letters.  The word assocation throws all kinds of things at me, as it decides which combinations qualify as "real words".  Dhar i...

Here is something that popped into my head randomly while trying to sleep last night ... Back in the late 90's, I was in my one and only Scrabble tournament.  It was a local fundraiser at the Escondido Public Library.  My wife-at-the-time was on my team, and two close friends were a couple on another team.  There were about 30 players, and our entry fees went to a literacy charity. I won a few rounds, and as I recall I made it to the round where there were only 2 games being played.  So if there were 32 players to start, round two would be 16, round three would be 8, round four would be those two games.  That all adds up (in my head). My fresh opponent started by saying, "Let's not add up the scores each round, so we can focus on the game.  It's such a hassle." I didn't know if there was an actual rule against doing that, but I figured I could ignore the total score.  Why should those numbers affect my choice of words anyway? In the end, we ...