House of Cat

music/art/culture

Vocabulary Yoga – 5

It’s time for another round of language-stretching vocabulary yoga. Here are some recent finds that I picked up on WordSpy and the Open Dictionary.
joy-to-stuff ratio: the time a person has to enjoy life versus the time a person spends accumulating material goods
butt bus: a bus parked near a pub or restaurant that is used as [...]

English Language Oddities

The list-loving folks at listverse.com have come up with 25 English Language Oddities to illustrate some of the curiosities and gotchas that native speakers don’t think about, but that make English one of the trickiest languages to learn. Here are some of my favorites:
“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt.”
“Ough” [...]

What’s a Word?

by Cat Johnson
Ever wondered how many words there are in the English language? Although it’s a common question, it’s apparently one that doesn’t have a good answer as it raises another question: what counts as a word?
Sounds like a trick question right? But, according to Michael Quinion at World Wide Words, even dictionaries can’t agree [...]