Brick's Science

Menu

Skip to content

Tag Archives: etymology

Etymology

Posted on July 15, 2019 by Brick Wahl

I suspect that most verbs began as nouns verbed and an ungodly number of nouns were once verbs nouned and not once but sometimes many times this renouning and reverbing takes place, leaving dictionaries a record of wanton anarchy and the decline of values over and over again.

Posted in Language and linguistics | Tagged etymology, grammar, nouns, verbs, versing | Leave a comment

Etymology

Posted on October 9, 2018 by Brick Wahl

I suspect that most verbs began as nouns verbed and an ungodly number of nouns were once verbs nouned and not once but sometimes many times this renouning and reverbing takes place, leaving dictionaries a record of wanton anarchy and the decline of values over and over again.

Posted in Language and linguistics | Tagged etymology, language, verbing | 1 Comment

Search

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Paleolithic handaxe
  • Lucy, or somebody like her
  • I am not just a giant hagfish.
  • Speciation
  • Sink Water Faucet Tip Swivel Nozzle Adaptor Kitchen Aerator Tap Chrome Connector
  • About all those missing words….
  • Jellyfish love
  • It’s a great big beautiful tomorrow
  • The deadliest people that you know are the people that you know
  • Crows
  • Climate change in our fish tank
  • Demographics
  • Birds singing
  • Baby platypuses
  • One million people exhaling billions of viruses
  • Stay home
  • Mockingbirds
  • A veritable ocean of inflections
  • Plague diary, March 24
  • Plague diary, March 23

Archives

My latest writing at: Brick Wahl

Zen as fuck

You know you’re a loser when you realize you’ve been binge watching eight hours of Richard Norton Smith interviews on C-SPAN. Well, technically it’s American History TV, just like watching writers on C-SPAN is technically BookTV, but come on, it’s C-SPAN. I mean who’s kidding who. It’s a nice break from watching hockey shows, anyway. […]

The pandemic at Eight O’clock

(from sometime in 2020) The eight o’clock howls began tonight with the shriek of a woman and some crazed percussion on a ceramic pot followed by scattered shouts and shrieks and whistles and ululations and frantic beating on bongos and boxes and beer bottles till literally hundreds of unseen voices join in, welling up from […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Picks

All the Young Dudes

This was the anthem of all us disaffected teens in the early 70s and we had no idea why, it just was, somehow. We hadn’t a clue what it was actually about, we just figured it was about all us shambling young and clueless dudes and dudettes, and it meant, well, who knows. Whatever. Metaphors […]

John Gilbert

Watched Downstairs last night, from 1932, in which John Gilbert is incredibly convincing as a vile, thieving, conniving lowlife of a chauffeur with no redeeming virtues whatsoever. Weird choice of role for a leading man with a career on the rocks, weirder still that he’d written the story himself and wanted to do it so […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Politics

Remember when Reagan said ketchup was a vegetable?

Actually Ronald Reagan didn’t say ketchup was a vegetable. And it wasn’t Reagan that didn’t say ketchup was a vegetable, anyway. It was his Department of Agriculture that didn’t say it. The ketchup bit was a sarcastic comment in I believe a Newsweek op ed that then did the 1981 analog equivalent of going viral, […]

We Are All the Suez Canal

Shit. Never mind.

My latest writing at: Brick's History

Cahuenga Parkway

Traffic on the Cahuenga Parkway in 1945. It was only a mile and a half long, it didn’t go the rest of the way into the San Fernando Valley until 1954 (by then it was called the Hollywood Freeway.) Doubtless WW2 had thrown the project off schedule. Gasoline was tightly rationed until the Japanese surrendered […]

About all those missing words….

Sorry there’s no more of the great gobs of prose I used to spill out all over these blogs. People have been asking. Alas, epilepsy was really fucking with the long essays, a d I finally had to stop. Had to stop working too. Had to stop just about everything. It’s been a couple years […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Brain

The ephemeral new

I can’t remember the sensation I was talking about here at all now. Even the memory of what it was liked has completely vanished, and until Facebook coughed this up from two years ago I didn’t even realize that that such an ephemeral newness had ever existed, which is a good thing, I guess, it […]

Words seem alive as I write them but lifeless written.

(No idea when I wrote this one, actually.) For me, and I have no idea if this is the same for anyone else, writing is like jazz improvisation. Not free jazz, there’s a melody and structure and it’s very syncopated, so each time I begin writing I’m off on a solo, and I work through […]

Follow Brick's Science on WordPress.com
Blog at WordPress.com.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Brick's Science
    • Join 1,218 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Brick's Science
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar