Suzie Eisfelder
September 15, 2010

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking out loud about English on the Pre-loved Books @ Suz’s Space Facebook Fan page. I don’t pretend to be interesting all the time as it’s just various things I’m thinking about and notice in my travels. Sometimes it’s things I’ve pulled out of one of my many books on the English Language while other times it’s something I’ve seen on TV or somewhere on the web.

I sometimes dwell on how English is a mongrel language and has words taken from so many different languages. I also sometimes look at how words change over time. One thing I’ve been doing recently is shortening the word ‘fabulous’ to ‘fabo’, I’ve been doing this in print as well as in speech and today I discovered one friend (Norlin of Baubles, Bubbles and Bags) has started using ‘fabo’. I admit she used it on Twitter and like SMS Twitter reduces a lot of words to their essence.

Here are a few of my musings:

Got a great word for you tonight, it’s ‘bombast’. It’s from the Elizabethan times when men of fashion used to pad their clothes with cotton, tow and other materials, this padding was called ‘bombast’ from the Old French ‘bombace’. It came to be used to describe shallowness of thought dressed up in extra-vagrant and high-sounding language. It’s something politicians use a lot.

Phoneme – the basic units in the sound system of a language. Phonemes come together to form syllables (can is made up of three phonemes) while some phonemes require two letters to represent the sound (for example ‘sh’).

Love some of the old phrases, pity they’re not used so much nowadays. The Goodies were just told to ‘not be so wet’. I haven’t heard that phrase for many years.

Orthography is the art of spelling words correctly. That’s really interesting as I thought it was a science and not an art. Oh well, you live and learn.

In camera comes from the Latin and means in a vault. If a courtcase is held ‘in camera’ then it’s held in the judge’s chambers rather than in the courtroom.

Homophones, nothing to do with being gay. These are words that sound alike but written differently with different meanings i.e. maize & maze.

Maize is corn. You can get corn meal which is actually made from maize or corn meal which is made from wheat so people who have problems with wheat or gluten need to be careful.

Maze is a labyrinth & nothing to do with food unless you get lost in one & end up starving to death.

Anyway, it’d be lovely to have you join me on the Pre-loved Books @ Suz’s Space Facebook Fan page for some fun and games.

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