Wordwizard

I read news on line for a couple of hours each day. I have not read print news in several years. I think the New York Times at Starbucks in the only newspaper to be found in our suburb of 20000. The library might get some day-old newspapers. My concern with the disappearance of print has to do with...

I read news on line for a couple of hours each day. I have not read print news in several years. I think the New York Times at Starbucks in the only newspaper to be found in our suburb of 20000. The library might get some day-old newspapers. My concern with the disappearance of print has to do with ...

Erik_Kowal wrote:For latecomers to the 24/7/365 party that is this website, there's also a lengthy Wordwizard thread on the subject.

This time I actually remembered to do a search and was overwhelmed with 55 thousand hits. How did you narrow the search?

Just an FWIW. I thought it interesting. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40220850/ ... d_gadgets/

How does one pronounce the name Schygulla as in Hanna Schygulla?

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0778016/

Booty where I come from means goods obtained not always legally. Have we found another I say tomato, you say tomato? For several decades I thought of booty as something pirates got off other persons ships. I cannot recall when I first heard booty with a sexual connotation. Now it is quite common on...

From Yahoo (ada AHD?) boo·ty2 (bt)also boo·dy (-d) NOUN: pl. boo·ties, also boo·dies Slang The buttocks. Vulgar Slang 1. The vulva or vagina. 2. Sexual intercourse. ETYMOLOGY: African American Vernacular English, from obsolete Black English booty, body, perhaps alteration of body What are the dates ...

When did "minutes" come to mean the notes taken at a meeting?

I'm assuming that 'minute' 1/60 and 'minute' chopped small are older.

I remember ninny and nincompoop from the late 40s used by people along the rivers where Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee come close together.

I just noticed that several dictionaries list the plural of tornado as tornadoes or tornados. As kids we were taught that when alternatives were listed the first was preferred. Is that still the case?

I was watching an old TV show last evening where a word pronounced ''mil'' was used to mean a 'million dollars'. It was one of those true crime type dramatizations so I've no way of know if it were slang created by the writers or if it represented street slang at the time. The setting would have bee...

Reviewing how did I miss it first time through I discovered that entering "precox" into m-w.com gives a recommendation to look at "praecox" but onelook.com does not. Reading the replies to my queries it would seem to me that m-w.com should have "precox" as an entry shouldn't it - since this spelling...

So how did "praecox" become "precox"? Is precox one of our latter day internet spellings? I see Google has about twice as many ghits for praecox and precox. Onelook has a few more praecox than precox. My spell checker doesn't like either.

There seem to be several medical terms, macrogenitosomia precox and dementia precox being most common but there are others, with "precox" where "pre-" means just that but I cannot find the origin of the "-cox".

There was a time when many nytimes.com articles would age off into a pay-for-view archive. If you have a keen interest in the link in the OP you might want to use the email option and send it to yourself.