use of the word 'sided'

As I reached for a small square of cotton to wipe my face this morning, I was struck by the words on the box: '100 sided sealed cotton squares'.

Sided? I'd never heard the word used in this sense, but when I looked at the cotton in my hand, I saw that it had been sealed down two sides, presumably to stop the cotton falling apart as I used it.



I had a look at the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary®, which gives the the definition:

side vb sid*ed; sid*ing vt (1591) to furnish with sides or siding <~ a house> ~

The dictionary on my computer says:

[ trans. ] provide with a side or sides; form the side of : the hills that side a long valley.

I think it's a great use of this word, precise and succinct.

By the way, they're not squares, as I use the word, because they're 5cm by 4cm.

a whole nother new word

Watching an entertaining YouTube clip about teaching cane corso puppies to eat fish, I was struck by the words of the narrator, 'a whole nother fish'. As I've posted before, I think this word nother will win the race and oust other, just as apron has ousted napron.

how fast do irregular verbs change?

I came across an article in Scientific American discussing the rate of change in the English language. Researchers at Harvard University believe that the words in most common use change slowly and uncommon words change more rapidly.

Mark Pagel and his team examined words in 87 Indo-European languages and concluded less-used used words might change over about 750 years, but common words might stay the same for as long as 10,000 years.

The article was interesting, but the examples selected by the author, Nikhil Swaminathan, seemed rather strange to me. He said:

Researchers scoured grammatical texts dating back to the days of Old English, cataloguing all the irregular verbs they came across. Among them: the still irregular "sing" / "sang," "go" / "went" as well as the since-regularized "smite" which once was "smote" in Old English but since has become "smited," and "slink," which is now "slinked" but 1,200 years ago was "slunk."

I regularly say "slunk", so I guess I should admit there are some mornings I wake up feeling 1200 years old.

I'm not into the business of smiting people, so I can't be sure whether I'd choose smited, but I have a feeling smote would be my choice.

have the worms turned?

For a long time I've suspected that worms must be getting tired of the government licensing people to stick them onto sharp hooks and put them in danger of being eaten by a fish.

Well, today the headlines tell the story. The worm has turned. (Actually, the worms have acted together, by the looks of it.)

There's been a long history of humans worrying about the worms rebelling. Even before Shakespeare's time it was a well-established source of stress.

I've come across a theory that the word worm in this context might have referred to dragons, or, more possibly, snakes, but I think today's photographic evidenced has settled the matter.

v-mail, e-mail and pee-mail

V-mail. Seems like a twenty-first century word. But it isn't. It's a word coined in the middle of the last century by the US military to describe a process of microfilming mail to and from military personnel.

The process, in which letters were written on special one-page sheets, originated in England. Microfilming letters lessened the weight of mail and made it possible for more efficient communication between military personnel and their families back home. A slide show at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum makes the process clear and shows the enormous difference in size between a pile of actual letters and the microfilmed copies.

But I've seen another use of the word V-mail. It's the title of a great little book I bought at the British Museum Shop, an intimate look at the everyday lives of Romans living at Vindolanda near Hadrian's Wall around the first century AD.

The tablets are small, thin pieces of wood and were used for letters, reports, lists or quick notes. The wooden slices were tied together in bundles. In the book there are all sorts of letters. I like the birthday invitation best:

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, for the day of the celebration of my birtuday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, it will make the day more enjoyable for me if you are present. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him their greetings. I shall expect you.

I thought the letter from Severus to his slave was interesting, too.

Severus to his Candidus, greetings. Regarding the dish for the Saturnalia, I ask you to buy it at a price of four or six asses and radishes to the value of not less than 1/2 denarius. Farewell.

Next I wanted to find out who coined the word email. But I haven't been able to find out. If anyone knows, I'd love to hear from you. I did discover the history of that first email, but not who named it.

And pee-mail? Well, as any dog-blogger knows, that's how dogs leave messages for each other on any available surface as they take their humans for a walk. It sure slows down our daily walk as my dog scans the liquid deposits for interesting snippets of news.

World's first historical thesaurus of english

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the world's first historical thesaurus, is to be published in two volumes on 8 October 2009. I read about this at English, Jack and followed the link to the BBC News, where the report includes a sample page giving the evolution of words for trousers.


Of course, we couldn't discuss trousers without thinking of that old favorite song, Donald where's Your Troosers?

And at Podictionary I read the surprising origin of the English word pants.

clever crows aren't murderers

As I walked the dog this morning I watched a crow going about its mid-winter business - gathering sticks, perhaps for its nest - and I wondered why a group of crows goes by the collective noun, a murder. I've seen some very amusing behavior by crows and I think they're fun to have around. (Maybe the Australian birds are actually ravens, but that distinction is in the 'too hard' basket for me, so I'll just call them crows.)

And this evening, on Boing Boing, I've just read an anecdote in which the expression murder of crows was used. Okay, that's a sign. I need to discover the truth about this harsh noun.

The American society of Crows and Ravens says

A "murder" of crows is based on the persistent but fallacious folk tale that crows form tribunals to judge and punish the bad behavior of a member of the flock. If the verdict goes against the defendant, that bird is killed (murdered) by the flock. The basis in fact is probably that occasionally crows will kill a dying crow who doesn't belong in their territory or much more commonly feed on carcasses of dead crows. Also, both crows and ravens are associated with battlefields, medieval hospitals, execution sites and cemeteries (because they scavenged on human remains). In England, a tombstone is sometimes called a ravenstone.

The Grammarphobia Blog, on the other hand, suggests the expression might be a fanciful one and not a genuinely medieval collective noun.

The Boing Boing post reported a study showing crows can recognise individual human faces.

I think they are one of the smartest birds around. And I like them.