Today I started a course in medical terminology (aiming to make myself more marketable). I have to restrain myself from speaking up too often, as I know more Greek and Latin (and which is which) than the teacher does. Evidently it is thought undesirable to burden the students with such notions as a distinction between nouns, adjectives and verbs.

Omniglot – a guide to writing systems. I have seen nothing like this on the Web. It even shows some scripts missing from my various books on the field.

A comment to Vodkapundit says “Lileks . . . must be the only writer in America to know and use the plural hiatii.” Lileks is of course free to invent words if he likes, in which case he’s naturally the only one to know them; but in Latin, there is no word in which singular -us corresponds to plural -ii. hiatus is a u-stem abstract, and its plural is hiatūs (with a long u).

And by the way, the plural of Elvis is Elvides. I have spoken.

The List of Possible Bandnames, for those who have musical talent or a knack for names, but not both.

One thing I haven’t managed to find with Google is the source of a cliché.

“Planes collide in midair” — raising the question: what are the boundaries of midair anyway? Is it midair if they’re one foot off the ground? One hundred? If there are mountains nearby, do they make a difference? When does a descending spaceship reach midair? In short, does midair tell us anything that air would not? Midocean can be defined as out of sight of land, or beyond the continental shelf, or in international waters; but none of these has an obvious analogy for air.

I was prompted by a post to alt.peeves to seek confirmation of my brilliant originality by websearching for phrases that I had jotted down as clever. In light of this research, the name of my band will be “A Wellmeaning Oaf”, and our first album will be “Return to Porlock”. (I am particularly disappointed in “Usual Suspicions” and “Red Weather”.)

In the process I found this essay by one Sarah David about enjoying the B-52’s. Whom, in turn, I didn’t expect to see dominating the search results so thoroughly (are there no webpages about bombers?). I can take only so much of the B-52’s at one sitting (about as much as Devo) but I love the counterpoint of “52 Girls”.

Another essay using that same phrase is this one about bad fight scenes in fiction.