How fast is the English language expanding?
According to new research, the English language has doubled in size over the last century.
Posts
What is the Rorschach test?
The Rorschach test is a diagnostic tool used to gain psychological insight. It uses 10 standard black or coloured inkblot designs to assess personality traits and emotional tendencies. In contemporary English, the term Rorschach test is often used metaphorically to describe what psychologists call projective assessment. Put simply, how you see something depends on your 'priors' or pre-existing assumptions. Who was Rorschach? Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922) invented the 'ink blot' personality test. The test emerged from the Swiss psychiatrist's lifelong passion for klecksography - turning inkblots into recognisable images. Influenced by the newly emerging field of psychoanalysis, Rorschach began exploring how emotion shapes perception. Rorschach had an unusual childhood. He was born into an an artistic family but lost both his parents at an early age and was brought up by a cold and distant stepmother. At school he was prodigy - speaking several languages and exce
Where does the word tycoon come from?
The word tycoon is derived from the Japanese word taikun (大君?).
What is a 'ghost word'?
The Second Edition of the 20-volume Complete Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use. An estimated 240 of these are ghost words.
Irish English: What is cat melodeon?
Don't shoot me I'm only the piano accordion player! Cat/ Cat melodeon (a): dreadful, no good, awful, very bad. Bernard Share’s dictionary of Irish slang Slanguage quotes Victoria White in the Irish Times calling cat melodeon “the greatest expression in Hiberno-English.” The word cat is used to express disappointment in the quality of something: the food is cat in that place. Where does Cat Melodeon come from? The Cat Melodeon players In his book on Irish traditional music, Ciaran Carson suggests it is a joking reference to the musicianship: of piano-accordion players (who often refer to their instruments as melodeons) to play two notes at once. Source As the nephew of a fine melodeon player, I think this is cat altogether - you throw in altogether for emphasis, by the way. When was it first used? Strangely some dictionaries cite the first use in print as being in the 1980s. This is decades after I first heard it. My guess is that it has been common in sp
