In a word: Nothing breviloquent about these long words sunjournal.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sunjournal.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In a word: Collocation: Soon to be your odds-on favorite
Collocations come in handy in telling the inspirational story of the woman who went from rags to riches after becoming tired of wearing mix-and-match clothes . . .
By Jim WitherellSpecial to the Sun Journal
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This week, word lovers, with the weather turning warm and our thoughts turning to ice cream and frozen drinks, it’s high time we talked about “frozen binomials.”
Say what? A frozen binomial is also called a “collocation,” which is the habitual juxtaposition of a particular word or words with a frequency greater than chance. Better?
In a word: Ado, petard, champing, dint and other fossils
Think about it, when was the last time you heard anyone use the word immemorial when they weren t referring to time?
By Jim WitherellSpecial to the Sun Journal
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“Sleight of hand and twist of fate . . .” from the song “With or Without You” by U2
I recently discovered a fossil, and the best part about it is that it was right in front of me, no digging required. Even better, it jumped right out at me while I was sitting at the kitchen table reading the sports pages, where retired pioneering race car driver Janet Guthrie compared her former sport to equestrian events, observing, “(H)orseback riding has since time immemorial been the one way a young girl had socially acceptable access to power.”
In a word: Beeves? The strange ways we make plurals sunjournal.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sunjournal.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In a word: Origins of IKEA, Legos, Arby’s and more
Just my luck, backing out of my garage, I smashed into my old Fiat, which stands for Fabbrica Italiano Automobili Torino (not Fix it again, Tony ).
By Jim WitherellSpecial to the Sun Journal
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A couple weeks ago, when I was sitting at Arby’s, my seat afforded me a wonderful view of the old Kmart sign across the way. So naturally I started wondering just where the names of businesses came from.
Right then I made it my mission to find out the origins of actual company names that are just initials or perhaps peppy-sounding acronyms. But before I started my quest, I needed to get some walking-around money from my tax refund.