by Jamie Chavez | Mar 20, 2017 | Words & Language
We’ve got exciting times goin’ on here in the good ol’ US of A, with one political party making some pretty interesting claims and the opposing party reacting with outrage. (See how I did that?) My Irish immigrant husband has spent hours watching debates and newscasts...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 12, 2016 | Words & Language
We’ve had a drought here in the American South. It stopped raining in early August and didn’t start again until early December, after the irrigation system had been turned off for some weeks. So it seemed only appropriate to republish this post from 2012—a sort of...
by Jamie Chavez | May 19, 2016 | Words & Language
One of the fundamental principles of structuralism is “the arbitrariness of the sign,” the idea that there is no necessary, existential connection between a word and its referent. Not “rightly is they called pigs,” as the man said, but by linguistic chance. Other...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 12, 2015 | Words & Language
I love slang but am less enamored of hyperbole, especially the kind that makes you sound like a thirteen-year-old (unless you’re writing fictional dialogue for young teens, in which instance go for it). In fact, I’m on record when it comes to the use of amazing, the...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 14, 2015 | Words & Language
I don’t know where I happened to stumble upon the Terralingua website— Terralingua works to sustain the biocultural diversity of life—the world’s precious heritage of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity—through an innovative program of research, education,...
