Archives for June 22, 2010

A couple enjoyable things:
• Tom & Lorenzo’s series on the fashion of “Mad Men”, a detailed look at the costumes of the different characters. If I were costume designer Janie Bryant I’d be over the moon about it — they are picking up everything she is laying down.
• Another bookmark: Schott’s Vocab blog, which is doling out a “lexicographical trifle” a day with an assist from the OED. Elsewhere on the word geekery front, I love this Language Log theory that pegs basketball player Manute Bol as the originator of the phrase “my bad.” Also: Team Snuck. (More here.)

“My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw–which I don’t mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker.”
Nigel Rees, Sayings of the Century