D3X73R

[I had said I'd be blogging weekly, but that didn't happen when I had to travel for family reasons. I have got(ten) back to it, not that you'll always notice. I've decided that my goal is to *write* for the blog each week, but not necessarily to publish. So, I started writing this one last week, finished this week.] I'm doing a lot of reading about the genitive case at the moment. Grammatical case is some kind of marking (e.g. a suffix) that shows what 'job' a noun is doing in a sentence. You might know a lot about case if you've studied German or Latin or Finnish (or some other languages), which have case suffixes on nouns. You'll know a little about case from being an English speaker who knows the differences between they, them , and theirs . Modern English marks pronouns for case, but not other nouns, except... Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had a robust case system, which it got from the ancestor it shared with German. The case suffixes pretty much ...

As with many of my discoveries about English, this one happened during a Scrabble game. I had played GEEZ and my opponent challenged it, stating that she thought I needed a J rather than a G. When British people think I've got English wrong, I make a note of it, go home, and look it up. And about half the time, it is because there is a national/dialectal difference to be found. (The rest of the time, it's down to some weird beliefs about language. And most of the things we believe about language are weird, and little to do with reality. This has been the main thesis of my research career.) Geez/jeez is originally AmE, a way of not-taking the name Jesus in vain. I was probably an adult before I reali{s/z}ed that. To me, it was just some thing people said, and I didn't make the connection, just like a lot of people probably don't reali{s/z}e (till someone tells them) that (BrE) crikey is a way to avoid saying Christ or (BrE) cor, blimey stared as an avoidance of God ...