January 2011
Killer spam
The woman, dubbed “The Black Widow,” who Russian authorities suspect was part of the same militant group that killed 35 people at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on Monday, was at a house preparing for the attack, which would have occurred on New Year’s Eve at Red Square. Instead, the woman’s mobile phone, which served as the device’s detonator, was activated hours early by a spam...
Stylish
A confession: I am planning to steal from the Telegraph style guide
Style guides are the one area of journalism, I think, where plagiarism is not frowned on. I am more than happy for others to copy from or adapt the Guardian’s guidelines and I imagine most style guide editors feel the same: we are all in the business of trying to persuade others to write and edit the way we do, so we...
Missing
At 5 p.m. on Dec. 2, 1919, Canadian theater magnate Ambrose Small met with a lawyer in his Toronto office. The lawyer departed at 5:30 p.m. Between 5:30 and 6:00, Small vanished.
No one saw him leave the office, and no body was ever found. The disappearance seemed senseless. Small was a self-made millionaire; no money was missing, there was no evidence of kidnapping, and no ransom note was...
Idaho
George Willing proposed the state name Idaho, which he claimed was an Indian word - but, actually, he just made it up. By the time statehood was achieved in 1890, the name had stuck.
Words
Take the gilt off the gingerbread
Meaning
Remove an item’s most attractive qualities.
Origin
This phrase has nothing to do with being guilty of anything of course - ‘take the guilt off the gingerbread’ is just a misspelling. The word is ‘gilt’, which refers to a thin layer of gold. Gingerbread is a form of cake and, although the association of the two words seems...
Mile-High Club
Aerial Petting Leads To Wetting Lawrence Sperry - Flier, Inventor Mile High Club’s Founder Page B22 - Atlantic Flyer, May 1993 “There are countless milestones and record breaking performances throughout aviation history; altitude and speed, distance and endurance, and so forth. Perhaps the most highly prized and sought after is the entry into the Mile-High Club - that fraternal order...
Duke's teacher
Duke Ellington’s piano teacher’s unforgettable name was Mrs Marietta Clinkscales.
Charlie Brown
In 1952, the introduction of Charlie Brown and the comic strip Peanuts with its clean drawings and psychological orientation made for a stark contrast with both the clutter and vaudeville-gag orientation in other cartoon strips of the time: “Most cartoon drawing is about distraction: popular masters like Walt Kelly and Al Capp crowded their panels with characters and activity; Pogo and...
Euphemisms
Euphemisms are an accurate gauge of what makes our society most uncomfortable, and since what makes society uncomfortable is constantly changing, there is a constant need for new euphemisms: “Euphemisms are an accurate barometer of changing attitudes. That is the theme of this book. Verbal evasions put a spotlight on what most concerns human beings at any given time. “There...
The Harlem renaissance
Duke Ellington (1899-1974), one of the most influential composers in jazz, if not in all American music, and the Harlem Renaissance. In the early twentienth century, there was an outpouring of American black literature, painting, and music known as the Harlem Renaissance. This movement faced its own challenges though, especially the continued burden of prejudice, and exclusion along with the...
Gutenberg & wine
For Johannes Gutenberg, it was the ubiquity of winemakers nearby that helped lead to the invention of the printing press around 1440 CE: “Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) … tells the story of a device winemakers had recently invented, a new kind of press that employed a screw to ‘concentrate pressure upon broad planks placed over the grapes, which are covered also with heavy...
Vaudeville
Vaudeville, the circuit of variety acts that went from town to town from the early 1880s until the early 1930s and was America’s most popular form of entertainment until nudged aside by the ascendance of cinema and radio. In the 1920s, Louise Hovick, later world famous as the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, was hustled from one theater to the next, overshadowed by her baby sister June,...
No mas
One of the most famous boxing matches in the history of the sport was the 1980 rematch between Olympic champion Sugar Ray Leonard and the Panamanian legend Roberto Duran. Duran, who was perhaps boxing’s fiercest fighter and who had bested Leonard in their first fight, stunned Leonard and the sporting world and brought disgrace upon himself when he simply quit mid-fight, declaring...
The Crystal Palace
The Crystal Palace of London, one of the greatest architectural triumphs of the nineteenth century, the largest building in the world at its completion, and a building whose design influence remains pervasive even today: “In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and...
Style Book q&a
Q&A The Guardian style guide editors answer readers’ queries – first in a series
We receive a large number of questions about Guardian style and wider language issues. This is the first in an occasional series of Mind Your Language blogposts attempting to answer some of them.
Big Society or big society?
Simon Hoggart rightly described this phrase as “surely the vaguest...
A history of the paper bag
Prompted by someone challenging the attribution of a paper bag in a recent exhibition, MoMA tracks down who invented the brown paper bag.
It was slightly later that a woman named Margaret Knight, working for another company, the Columbia Paper Bag Company of Springfield, MA, designed a machine that could produce flat/square-bottomed paper bags, a great improvement on the earlier, ...
Unused baby foreskins for sale
Hospitals routinely sell foreskins collected from newborn circumcisions to companies for thousands of dollars. These companies use them for 1) making expensive skin cream, 2) cosmetic testing, and 3) skin grafts for burn victims.
So with those foreskins, or more accurately, the fibroblasts from the cells of the foreskin, collagen can be lab-created, and where do you put collagen? On your face!...
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
A woman in Florida turns up raped and beaten in a ditch and can’t remember who attacked her. The security tapes at her hotel show that she didn’t leave her room that evening. What follows is a good ole fashioned detective story with a tenacious private detective getting to the bottom of the story.
He had a fixed policy. He told potential employers up front, “I’ll find...
