Rambles at starchamber.com

Which word is more colorful: color or colour?
If you’re American, do you ever color your “colors” with an occasional “U” to lend your prose a sense of savoir faire? At any rate, have you ever wondered where the U went? A lovely blog called COLOURlovers addresses this question with an informative post called Color [...]

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Good stories always trump facts. A good story is like brain glue. It stabilizes loose piles of memory inventory, thereby relieving some of your mental strain. This is why we have famous people say the things they should have said: because your brain is always trying to relax.
For example, did Galileo, while being tried in [...]

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Friend of the Star Chamber and regular commenter JMike is the guest author today. He wrote this in an email to me some time ago, and I asked him if I could post it. I’ve been meaning to put it up on the site for a while, and when I saw his recursive Billy Crystal [...]

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We’ve had a few interesting discussions here about snowclones. Snowclone is the unlovely name given to the notion of phrasal templates, or what might be called do-it-yourself cliché kits. One of the great snowclones of our age is “X is the new black“, a construction that generalizes into “X is the new Y”.

Search engines can [...]

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Today I’m happy to present another contribution from the classroom of Alan Kennedy, our correspondent from the front lines of teaching English as a Second Language. This time he’s talking about the surprisingly complicated dangly bits of English: articles and prepositions. You never notice them until they’re out of place.
One of the odd things about [...]

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The topic is Turkey and the question is: Which came first, the country or the bird? The country. But the next question is: Why should an Old World country be associated with a New World bird? The answer is the same as with so many other things in the New World: we tend to name [...]

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The best three-word line in Pulp Fiction is delivered by Samuel L. Jackson in the middle of a pre-hit tirade: “Say what again.”
If you can’t remember the scene, watch this brilliant example of dynamic typography.
Oh, but first:

WARNING: Scorchingly naughty language in use. May singe hair or burn exposed skin. That Samuel L. Jackson got a [...]

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Regular Rambles readers will recall my friend Alan Kennedy’s last contribution: RIKE ORION. In it, he recounts some of his experiences teaching English as a Second Language in New York City. He’s back this week with some more transcultural observations.
The way names move across language barriers makes for a good spectator sport. I am reminded [...]

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During a work lunchtime conversation that touched on a rude topic, one of my co-lunchers remarked: “That’s so wrong in so many ways!” That sentence is an odd construction, I thought to myself. She didn’t make it up. Where did it come from? There was a time when it didn’t exist. Somebody made it up [...]

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If you like words (and I know that you do), then you need to pay a visit to Wordie. They have a really good tag line: “Like Flickr, but without the photos.” The premise is so simple that you can’t possibly suspect you’ll get sucked into it until it’s too late.

Here’s how it works. Get [...]

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