Placebo Effects: More Than Medical
It’s “resolution reset” season already. At least that’s what an ad I received yesterday proclaimed. And it set me to thinking …
Word Nerdery
In Which I Play the Prediction Game
Not being a person tightly tied to the Gregorian calendar, I have little use for new year’s resolutions and predictions, etc. Yet here I am, in the uncomfortable position of offering a prediction that could perhaps reach a tipping point as early as 2030.
Rereading a Classic Revealed Older English Syntax Hidden Behind Punctuation
It was a little embarrassing to discover recently—after multiple rereadings—that one of my favorite English novels contains clues about the language’s syntax in the late 18th–early 19th centuries.
This Holiday Has Never Been Hollow
A certain kerfuffle that’s been in the news has focused some attention on two words whose conflation has always perplexed me. It stems from a gripe I have about American English speakers.
Those Pesky Homophones Again …
Today’s homophone pair highlights an increasingly widespread misuse of the older word.
Of Roses and Odors and Word Meanings
One of my greatest difficulties as a college professor teaching Introductory Psychology was getting many students to see that commonplace words often have a more restrictive definition in psychology, so that they would use them more precisely in their work. This has long been an issue: common words were used in psychology and given more specific meanings (e.g., “learning” and “instinct”); and psychological terms’ definitions have changed and/or expanded over time (e.g., “psychopathology”). The recent misappropriation of a psychological term for another purpose has brought these issues to mind again.