by Maeve Maddox | Jun 30, 2016 | English Usage
A reader asked me, “How does a word like rare become idiomatically used to mean eager, as in ‘raring to go’?” Answer: It didn’t. The rare in “raring to go” has nothing to do with the adjective that means, “seldom...
by Maeve Maddox | Jun 24, 2016 | Popular Culture
When I heard that a new Tarzan movie was about to be released, I started thinking about the Tarzan of my childhood: Johnny Weissmuller. I remember Weissmuller as a great swimmer—he usually had at least one scene in which he killed some creature in the water—and as a...
by Maeve Maddox | Jun 9, 2016 | Popular Culture
The Jeopardy errors continue to accumulate. Here’s a clue from the June 8, 2016 Double Jeopardy category “The Book Book”: $800 The “day” medieval English folk thought the world would end; it comes before “Book” in the name of...
