Words

I was excited to see the newspaper headline "Bielema liberal." "After all those neo-Nazis, we've finally got a coach who thinks right," I told friends. "I wonder if he belongs to the ADA."

Jim Newell was gripped by exasperation himself after reading this item in the business section. "Exacerbated" is the word the writer wanted, he sagely suggests.

"What year would Oaklawn recognize as its 100th anniversary? After all, Oaklawn's advertising material is ripe with 'Since 1904,' but it's widely reported the first race wasn't run until 1905."

"David Hay, the bee master at the 45th annual U-T San Diego Countywide Spelling Bee, had to call a recess halfway through the two-student final round after the 92 middle-schoolers competing exhausted his supply of 500 words."

"This hashtag-heavy era of puffery places marketing weight on Anderson's claim to commandeer the fastest team in the country, but nobody would accuse any of his three squads to date of playing with much composure."

What is the sound of one brussel sprouting?

This being an election year, many trite old political terms will be brought out for another interminable go. One such is dark horse. I recently stumbled across the fact that dark horse was created by none other than the Ol' Diz. No, not the great right-handed pitcher from Arkansas, Dizzy Dean. The other one.

Among the things Winston Churchill knew that I don't (a rather lengthy list, incidentally): "There are learned men who do not know that byss is the opposite of abyss.

Has there been a word or phrase so commonly used in political discourse recently, and so little understood, as "private option"?

They don't go together like a horse and carriage.

Some people, including me at times, have trouble with evoke and invoke.

"How quants have led us astray," the headline said, and I thought, "What have those Dionne girls been up to now?"

We've talked before about there being no formal rules for choosing the correct preposition. Mostly, one learns through usage, by paying attention to what people say and write.

A reader asks whether a brazen lie is bald-faced or boldfaced.

As far as I can recall, I never knew that there was a difference between a lawyer and an attorney.

"A 26-year-old North Little Rock man who told police he abandoned a woman 'butterball naked' outside an empty house after breaking a promise to pay her for sex was sentenced to life in prison Thursday by a jury that convicted him of kidnapping."

I've fought the impractical/impracticable battle before. It's left me with scars and not much else.

Not much in the way of language error gets by the Arkansas Times' managing editor, Leslie Peacock. I've had personal experience with this. Leslie advises me there's a television series on AETN about a character named Doc Martin, "who is phobic about blood."

I can remember when fans didn't boo at Razorback games, or at college games generally. That's changed obviously, and it started me wondering about, among other things, where the word boo comes from.

The old Arkansas Gazette observed a distinction between lawyer and attorney, and if you worked there, you were expected to remember it. I did and still do, but I think that it's largely ignored in general usage today.