Rambles at starchamber.com

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 [...]

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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. [...]

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I just got back from a vacation in northern California, and while I was strolling down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, I happened across this sign at the Mediterranean Cafe. I haven’t seen a sign like this in a long time, but I suspect partial nudity is a bigger problem in Berkeley than in most of [...]

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The old Roman patron saint of January was Janus, the god of thresholds and transitions. In honor of Old Twoface, today’s special word is “contranym.” A contranym, sometimes called a “Janus word,” can take on either of two opposite meanings. One of the nicest examples is “fast,” a word with the nautical connotation of being [...]

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Linguists and sociologists have, for years, been making dialect maps on which are displayed, for example, those places where people would be likeliest to refer to a water fountain as a “bubbler.” Professor Bert Vaux keeps an excellent archive here on his website at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (where, strangely enough, people sip their [...]

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Here’s yet another list of animal congregations, as in the query What Do You Call a Group Of…..? What I want to know is, who makes this stuff up? I mean, really, was there ever a time when people found it useful and pertinent to refer to an ostentation of peacocks? I don’t believe it. [...]

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Ever wonder where the word mondo comes from? As used in a phrase like “a mondo party” or the old magazine title Mondo 2000, it has connotations of bigness and hipness and weirdness. It gets used precisely because of its imprecise implication of coolness. Brandish it with a swagger and nobody will challenge you, being [...]

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I’ve always been interested in semiotics, but I find most discussions of it ridiculously abstract and off-putting. Then one day I’m searching for something random (“images of cartoon hands”) and Google lands me on this Semiotics for Beginners page. It is what it says: an introduction, lucid and enjoyable, to the quicksand world of semiotics. [...]

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Your mother didn’t make you. Who did? Your mother gave you a warm room and plenty of food. Who made you? It’s a tricky question. To speak of making implies two things: the thing being made and the one who makes it. Birds make nests. Bees make hives. Carpenters make houses. But mothers don’t make [...]

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