Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

What’s That Thing Where You Feel That Thing and It Makes That Other Thing Happen?

May 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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You know that sudden rush of existential dread that comes from your alarm seemingly going off just moments after you shut your eyes and you are no longer able to ignore the cosmically-pointless-but-personally-frightening impending machinations of the day ahead? Or that thing where you see a dog, blissfully unaware of the futility of its own existence, getting sprayed in the stomach by a water hose and you can't help but wonder why not me? There are no words for those feelings because there are no words for a lot of feelings. Other languages often do a better job—think "schadenfreude," or ... Read More

More like this: Education
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Linguistic Myths and Adventures in Etymology

March 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The alarm went off. What does that mean? Recently, a friend who is learning English couldn’t quite figure it out. Isn’t the alarm going on, not off, he asked. Comprehending such phrases is often one of the more difficult steps in learning a language. These idiomatic expressions are collections of words that mean something different than each word’s dictionary definition. For example, “that barking dog next door is driving me up the wall,” if taken literally, could mean that the neighbor’s poodle has recently earned a driver’s license and is using a car to accelerate up the ... Read More

More like this: Education, Skeptic's Café
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‘Fly’-ing to Safety

October 24, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

You sidle up, catlike, concealing the fly swatter, hoping your shadow won’t give you away, not when the blasted bug has finally stopped buzzing, right there on the wall, at a reachable height, if you can just catch it off-guard … THWACK! And just as you condescend to check the swatter — for surely no beast could survive such a hammer blow — you hear the telltale, mocking sound: buzz, buzz, buzz. The fly has lived another day (or two). How do they get away? A new study from the California Institute of Technology, where researchers analyzed high-resolution, high-speed imaging of fruit ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, November-December 2008, The Cocktail Napkin
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