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debcourt
Jun 10, 20224 min read
Punctuation, Past and Present
Today we will look at – be still, my beating heart – the history of punctuation. Yes, punctuation has a history, and yes, it is more...
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debcourt
May 13, 20224 min read
Confessions of a solitary Scrabbler
Confession: I sometimes play Scrabble with myself. Okay, quite often. There, I said it. When she and I (our preferred pronouns) play, our...
38 views4 comments
debcourt
Apr 4, 20224 min read
Diminounation: You may now forget this word.
Readers under the age of fifty may want to skip this blog post. You may not (yet) be suffering from diminounation, a word I just invented...
88 views2 comments
debcourt
Feb 20, 20224 min read
Humpty, Shakespeare and the River
Some nursery rhymes stick with us from generation to generation and from century to century. The ones that stick usually have simple,...
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debcourt
Jan 23, 20224 min read
What words mean
Among my readers and subscribers (who, I blush to tell you, now number in the double digits, and the first digit is no longer one!) are...
30 views1 comment
debcourt
Jan 3, 20224 min read
Cheap Tricks to Achieve Modest Immortality
No, not the spiritual kind. We are in favor of that mode of immortality, but since we cannot really know anything about it, it isn't blog...
30 views1 comment
debcourt
Dec 15, 20214 min read
Language, Culture and the Pronoun Revolution
We have talked in this blog about how language changes, how new words are introduced from the surrounding culture, and how language and...
82 views1 comment
debcourt
Nov 16, 20214 min read
Confessions of a cisgender logophile
I am amazed and thrilled that there are still so many new words to learn. Some of them actually are new words – recently coined to name a...
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debcourt
Oct 19, 20214 min read
Famous last (and first) words
Before we get down to business in this blog post, where does the phrase "famous last words" come from, anyway? Nobody knows who actually...
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debcourt
Oct 4, 20213 min read
We Are Not Anhedonic, and Other Thoughts
Well, this is a fine kettle of fish, isn't it? Or if we were British (which I, as a Canadian, confusingly sort of partly am) a pretty...
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debcourt
Sep 10, 20214 min read
Excuses, Excuses
Hello, dear blog readers, single digit though you may now be due to my long absence. Some of you, disgusted by my inconstancy, may have...
24 views1 comment
debcourt
Jul 19, 20214 min read
Everything you always wanted in a blog post - and less!
This blog is about the quirks of the English language, about writing and writers, about punctuation, grammar, where words come from and...
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debcourt
Jun 24, 20214 min read
A Musing on Vocabularic Butterflies
We have touched on the topic of this blog post before – that language is not static; it is a living human enterprise, it changes and...
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debcourt
May 28, 20214 min read
Fun with Literary Insults and Our Need for Comedy
I got to thinking about insults recently after reading a novel (Nine Perfect Strangers, by Lianne Moriarty) in which a teen-aged brother...
58 views2 comments
debcourt
May 10, 20214 min read
Musings on Nyms and Phobias
Once again inspired by something sent by a friend and blog subscriber, I would like today to address the whole sorry business of nyms....
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debcourt
Apr 27, 20214 min read
Limericks: Lecherous, loose, lusty, lewd, lascivious?
No, this is not a post about alliteration. Stop that. This post is about the limerick as a verse form. A few weeks ago a friend and...
98 views2 comments
debcourt
Apr 15, 20214 min read
Words That Never Were
My husband and I were sitting at the dinner table a few days ago, he chewing discontentedly on the vegan meat I had served him. We were...
33 views2 comments
debcourt
Apr 7, 20214 min read
What is a Good Book?
A friend and blog subscriber recently sent me the following quote by the late writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson: "No two persons...
141 views0 comments
debcourt
Mar 18, 20213 min read
New Horizons for the Modest Pronoun
A modest soul, the pronoun. Not like the endlessly descriptive adjective. Not like the world-defining noun. Not like the decorative and...
23 views1 comment
debcourt
Mar 9, 20214 min read
The New Toyota's Are In!
Circa 1990. A street in Vancouver, British Columbia. A sign on the large window of an automobile dealership. A woman is passing. She...
34 views1 comment
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