I was nineteen, serving in the Navy aboard USS Portland (LSD 37). When the Marine barracks were bombed, those Marines weren’t an abstraction to us. They were our Marines. I grew up that day. Over the years, I wrote poems to try to express what I felt. This song brings together two of them, both … Continue reading October 23, 1983
Writers are often told to become butchers. “Kill your darlings” originally meant something simple: remove the parts of a story you love if they weaken the story. That advice matters. Every writer learns that a beautiful paragraph can hurt pacing, a favorite joke can ruin tension, or a subplot can bury the heart of a … Continue reading Protect Your Darlings
"You Complete Me!" English occasionally produces word pairs that seem too neatly matched to be accidents. Compliment and complement are one of those pairs. Most dictionaries will tell you they are simply different words with different histories that happen to sound alike. That is true as far as it goes. Yet when you look at … Continue reading Tom’s Fun with Words – Compliment and Complement
Yes. It is. And that surprises most people. When we see a word beginning with un-, we naturally assume there must be a positive form lurking somewhere behind it. Sometimes we’re right. Sometimes English has other plans. In the case of unruly, however, the positive form is very real. Ruly means orderly, obedient, or governed … Continue reading Tom’s Fun with Words – Is the Opposite of Unruly… Ruly?
Historically, wood and would arrive by different routes. Wood comes from Old English wudu, meaning timber, forest, or material from trees, a thoroughly physical word tied to building and fuel. Would comes from wolde, the past form of willan, meaning to want or wish. One grew out of the landscape; the other grew out of … Continue reading Tom’s Fun with Words – Would a Woodchuck Chuck…
Seam and Seem are homophones. They sound identical, which in some way is English’s way of laughing at us. They look as though they should be related, and for a moment they even share Old English soil, but beneath that overlap they are doing entirely different jobs. A seam is unapologetically physical. It comes from … Continue reading Tom’s Fun with Words – Seam/Seem
Terrific did not begin life as a compliment. It comes from the Latin terrificus, meaning “that which causes terror,” built from terrere (to frighten) and facere (to make). When the word entered English in the seventeenth century, a terrific event was something that rattled the nerves, a violent storm, a massive explosion, a spectacle that … Continue reading Tom’s Fun with Words – Terrific
The Quantum Entanglement Cosmology (QEC) Theory posits that the universe functions as a closed-loop gravitational system in which black holes act not as destructive endpoints, but as “intake nodes” in a vast, quantum-entangled network woven through spacetime foam. Matter and energy drawn into a black hole do not cease to exist; instead, they are channeled … Continue reading Quantum Entanglement Cosmology
The prefix di- comes from Greek and means “two” or “double,” appearing in words like divide and dioxide. That's obvious (duh), but what the heck is a lemma? Sounds like a bean or wooly-haired critter or something. Well, from Greek again, lemma means “a proposition or choice.” Thus, "di-lemma" literally means “two propositions” or “two … Continue reading Tom’s Fun with Words – Dilemma
Today we’re going to talk about con. That small Latin prefix means “with” or “together,” and it shows up everywhere. For instance: connect, converse, context. The uses are straightforward enough. Connect comes from con + nectere, meaning “to bind together.” Converse comes from con + vertere, “to turn with,” the back-and-forth turning of words between … Continue reading Tom’s Fun with Words – CON
