Posts Tagged: biography

  • Newspaper (THE WEEKLY WORD for word of the week) page with headline THESAURUS TRUCK CRASHES and A truck loaded with thousands of copies of thesauruses crashed yesterday. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralysed, dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed, dumbfounded, nonplussed, flabbergasted, astounded, amazed, confounded, astonished, overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, speechless, and perplexed.

    Thesaurus—storehouse, hoard, treasury …

    A truck loaded with thousands of copies of thesauruses crashed yesterday. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralysed, dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed, dumbfounded, nonplussed, flabbergasted, astounded, amazed, confounded, astonished, overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, speechless, and perplexed. This joke has been doing the rounds of the Internet and whenever I […]

  • William Safire as man of letters

    William Safire and his rules for writers

    William Safire (1929–2009) was an American political speechwriter, journalist, political columnist, and language expert who transformed his reputation from a fiercely partisan commentator of the right into a widely respected “man of letters”. Nixon’s speechwriter Safire began his career in public relations before becoming a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew. […]

  • Image from page 364 of "With Byron in Itlay; a selection of the poems and letters of Lord Byron relating to his life in Italy. Edited by Anna Benneson McMahan" (1907)

    Byronic Bicentenary

    Today (19 April 2024) is the 200th anniversary of the death of George Gordon Byron, known to us as Lord Byron. He was a hugely popular poet of his day. The characters in his long poems and his own colourful life have given us the adjective “Byronic”. To understand being Byronic it is important to […]

  • John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Image from https://blog.allganize.ai/john-mccarthy/

    Artificial intelligence making the news

    Everyone is talking about the free-access Chat GPT released in early December last year (2022). It uses artificial intelligence to generate reasonably sophisticated copy. One journalist wrote an article for the ABC that suggested it was good enough to pass some medical exams. Another from the Sydney Morning Herald got the bot to write the article. The […]

  • Image of Neil Armstrong with the Scottish Reivers on the left background as his ancestors and the moon landing on the right.

    Armstrong and the Reivers

    The Scottish Borderland follows the Cheviot Hills. It is quite a beautiful part of Britain. Nearby is Hadrian’s Wall a symbol that even the Romans could not control this wild area at the edge of their empire. Between the 13thand 17thcenturies the Scottish Borders was a no-go area controlled by the Reivers, it’s local war-lords. They […]

  • Ward Cunningham in Hawaiian shirt in front of the Wiki Wiki Shuttle bus (photoshopped image by Madrigal Communications)

    Wiki wikipedia

    Words on my Hawaiian holiday We recently had a holiday to Hawaii, which was a big tick on the bucket list. My wife and I had spent three hours in transit at Hawaii Airport 25 years ago wishing we could have seen a bit more. Arriving in Honolulu International Airport, I noticed that the shuttle […]

  • ast week (5 April 2018) saw the passing of Eric Bristow, the five times World Darts Champion known as the Crafty Cockney. Our word of the week is oche to remember him.

    Farewell from the oche Eric Bristow

    Last week (5 April 2018) saw the passing of Eric Bristow, the five times World Darts Champion known as the Crafty Cockney. He is no longer at the oche. As one sports commentator cleverly wrote, Bristow died at the age of treble twenty, sixty being the highest achievable score with one dart. Reading of Bristow’s […]

  • Sobek, the crocodile god

    Tears for the crocodile

    I have just got back from a trip to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland with my family. While we were there we visited the Australia Zoo at Beerwah. It is, of course, famous as the “home of the Crocodile Hunter”, Steve Irwin. It is a great zoo and now a bit of a memorial for […]

  • Hiram Codd and his Codd Bottle

    Codswallop—a load of old or new

    Codswallop is slang for nonsense. It is a way of calling something fanciful and untrue without having to resort to the more overtly crude bullshit. Although there is no doubt to its meaning its origins are not clear. It has only been found in written English in the last fifty years. Wallop has been in […]

  • Edward Lear and illustrations of some of his limericks—colourised by Madrigal

    A limerick maker named Lear

    This year marks the bicentenary of Edward Lear’s birth in 1812 (he died in 1888). He is most famous for his comic verse for children of which many were limericks. However, Lear never called his verse limericks. The word was first used after his death. No one is quite sure where it comes from. Limericks […]

  • Murray Gellman inventor of the quark

    Quirky quarks

    One of the great attractions of being a scientist is that, like the early explorers, you get to name what you discover. As a student I was excited when our lecturer announced his expedition had found a 10 metre long fossil python at Riversleigh, Queensland, and it had been called  Montypythonoides rivereleighensis in a rather […]