Category Archives: humanities

Sunnydalish

Can you speak Buffy? Now the witty diction of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been accorded the academic respect that it deserves in Professor Michael Adams’s Slayer Slang (Oxford University Press). Under headings such as ‘The Attraction of Prefixes’ and … Continue reading

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translation sought

The log says נפגעי תקיפה מינית linked yesterday to one of my math doodles. Do you read Hebrew?

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a bundle of sticks

On the Straight Dope site: Semantic and geographic wanderings, over the past two centuries, of the words fag, faggot.

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a question for philologists

Is the phrase “some are more equal than others” older than Animal Farm?

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an even number of odd links

In a surprising place, a history of the hamburger. (Linked by Bruce Sterling.) Time Cube Central: your unofficial timecube resource (found through Crank Dot Net). 2006: dead.

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the creation of tradition

Aha! When this blog was young and innocent, I asked how the heck Madison came to be a favorite name for girls. Rick Heller cites a NYT article with the answer: a movie that I never saw.

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would they understand the joke?

My One True Ex, home from a week of theatre-hopping in London, reports that there exists a chain of sex-toy shoppes named Lovecraft. Do they sell Cthulhu dildos? tentacle rape manga?

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