Wordwizard

<2019 “In March, a far-right gunman murdered 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — and left behind a document describing Muslim immigrants as ‘invaders’ and Trump as ‘a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.’ And now, this latest massacre in El Paso [[add Dayton]]. ...

Jim,

Very astute observation! I like it!! For those interested Wikipedia has a discussion at Damascus steel.
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Ken Greenwald – August 6, 2019

<2019 “This vision of a comparatively open border and some freedom of travel is increasingly what is meant on the Korean Peninsula by ‘reunification.’ There has been talk of normalized relations and corporate exchange, and Seoul has even floated the notion of a European Union-style confederation. L...

<2019 “. . . ‘This is a fantasy.’ She [Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren] was talking about the enormous platform she has, now that she’s running for President, to propagate political proposals that she has been thinking about for decades. ‘It’s a moment of being able to talk abou...

Hi Bob, I’ve always pronounced it vee-ola . I checked 10 dictionaries and found that 8 of them pronounced it vee-ola . Merriam-Webster regular and unabridged gave vye-ola as an alternate pronunciation. And here is the OED ’s pronunciations. I have always been too lazy to learn or look up their pronu...

bijou / bijou strongman <2019 “President Trump heaped praise on Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban during his visit to the White House this week, shrugging off concerns about the Central European leader’s increasing authoritarianism. . . . Sitting next to Orban must have ‘stoked a jealous rage in...

John,

Good one!!
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Ken - May 16, 2019

I was surprised to see that. Wiki and Urban Dictionary aren't the most reliable sources...usually. They're not the most reliable sources, but in this instance they were the only dictionary sources. That may have been the first time I ever quoted the Urban Dictionary . :( ___________________ Ken — M...

John, You’re right. The antonym of the prefix ‘ortho-‘ is ‘homo-‘ For example, “homogenous vs. heterogenous.” So I agree that it seems the straightforward antonym of ‘heterodox’ should be ‘homodox.’ The path to getting the antonym of ‘heterodox’ to be the word ‘orthodox’, however, is a bit more circ...

<2019 “Recently, under the somewhat unlikely inspiration of Elizabeth Warren [U.S. Senator], some conservatives have revived an old debate: Did millions of women entering the work force actually make families worse off? In her lost days as a heterodox public intellectual, Warren made the case that ...

Talking in the abstract is an idiom that means to be talking in a general way, without referring to a particular real person, thing or situation. So when Mrs May said "no deal is better than a bad deal" she was implying that in general she thought that was true and didn't want people to think that ...

Phil,
Your comments have clarified the distinction between 1 and 3 in my mind. Thanks.
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Ken - April 30, 2019

In an interesting article titled ‘The Rich Kid Revolutionaries: Children of privilege, like Abigail Disney, are taking a moral stand against inequality,’ I came across a word that I never knew could be used as a verb: <2019 “Immigrants who ‘make it’ are often seen to exemplify the American dream of ...

Thanks Erik. Interesting!

You have USA: trash truck

I have never heard the expression 'trash truck' used. I've always heard and used 'garbage truck.'
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Ken - April 25, 2019

Tintoretto [[famed artist of Renaissance Venice]] didn’t idealize his godly or saintly subjects and set them at a remove . He put us nose-close to figures in swirling, cinematic motion; “his high-wire scenes dare us to look away.”— The Week , 26 April, page 23 A few years back when I wrote the post...