Instead of the Dishes » There’s a Word for That
There's a Word for That: Catch 22
Catch-22 Stuck between a rock and a hard place Damned if you do, damned if you don’t All three of these sayings mean roughly the same thing, but while the second two are fairly straight forward in their meaning, a Catch-22 doesn’t really explain itself well. Craig suggested “Catch-22” for a TWT post. Catch-22 is relatively young for a saying or phrase. It was born in 1961 as the title of a book by Joseph Heller. Catch-22 is the term Heller coined to invoke military bureaucracy. The number 22 was chosen simply because it sounded nice. It is used multiple times in the novel when characters are grappling with circular logic. The main focus of Catch-22 (the novel) is the dilemma of WWII fighter pilots who wish to be grounded from combat missions on … Read entire article »
Filed under: There's a Word for That, Write & Blog
There's a Word for That: Snack Time Edition
Guess what Hibiscus plants and S’mores have in common? No really, guess. Marshmallows. What? Oh, yes! Of course, I will explain, in 200 words or less. You see, in one of my recent posts, I misspelled the word marshmallow. After being corrected by my friend Janet, I went to fix it, and got to wondering why it’s spelled “mallow” instead of “mellow”. Although the legend varies, the rough basics of it is that there was a dessert made from the root of a marsh mallow plant that was fluffy, and that when the plant root was replaced by a man-made syrup as an ingredient, the dessert also morphed into today’s sugar-on-sugar puffy treat, the marshmallow. Another version of the story claims that the confection we know as a marshmallow resembles the flower of the … Read entire article »
Filed under: Homemaking, Mommyhood, There's a Word for That
There's a Word for That: Muggy
Muggy, Muggy, Muggy. It’s one of those words that’s just fun to say. Except when the air around you is muggy, and then you don’t want to have to breathe in enough air to say anything. It’s starting to get that way around here. We finally broke down and turned on the AC this evening. So, I always thought that muggy was a slangy-type term. Turns out, I was wrong. Muggy is defined in all the various dictionaries with only one definition: damp, humid, and close. The word Muggy is believed to have originated in the 1700’s, stemming from an old norse word, mugen, which means mist. So, “Muggy” is an official, technical term. (Strangely enough, an image search for “muggy” will give you pictures of teddy bears, remote control cars, and … Read entire article »
Filed under: There's a Word for That
There's a Word for That: Dasani
Dasani is a brand of water bottled by Coca-Cola. I did a little research into the origins of the word Dasani and found that it originates from the Coca-Cola marketing team. There is no definition for it, although one exec tried to insinuate that the word Dasani conjured a “Roman God of Water”. For me, though, Dasani conjures visions of home, of my kids playing in the bathtub, of my sweaty yard man (hubby) drinking from the water hose, and even, *gasp* of me doing the dishes. You see, Dasani is bottled here in Little Rock. From tap water. Sure, they filter it (so do I, with a Brita pitcher), and they add some salt and potassium chloride (you know, the stuff in the chemical cocktail used for lethal injections) to … Read entire article »
Filed under: Around the House, Around the Town, Go Green, Health, Health & Fitness, Spending Less, There's a Word for That
Theres a Word for That: kWh
In honor of Earth Day, my TWT posts will center on energy and “green” concepts this month. kWh stands for Kilowatt Hour, which is the measure of energy used by your electric company to figure your bill. A kilowatt hour is equivalent to using 1000 watts of electricity in one hour. You can figure how many kilowatt hours an electrical appliance uses by multiplying its wattage by the amount of time you are using it, and dividing by 1000. So, for example, (caution! english major doing math here!) if you have a 100 watt light bulb in your lamp, and you have the lamp on for one hour, you use 0.1 kWh of electricity. If you keep that same lamp on for 10 hours, you’ve used 1 kWh. You can use this … Read entire article »
Filed under: Around the House, Go Green, Spending Less, There's a Word for That
There's a Word for That: Wiki!
Last week’s word association was fun – thanks to everyone who commented. We’ll do that again soon. I’m thinking about trying to write something that includes all your associated words…stay tuned! So this week, as I was noodling around for what to write about in this week’s TWT post, I kept landing back on an oft-used website resource, Wikipedia. And then I started to wonder, what is a “wiki” anyway? So, I looked it up (on Wikipedia, of course!). A wiki, essentially, is a website that allows multiple people to create content and pages which are all linked together. The creator of the first wiki, Ward Cunningham, named his wiki the WikiWikiWeb. Wiki means “fast” in Hawaiian. Later, other people turned it into an acronym and said it stood for What I … Read entire article »
Filed under: There's a Word for That, Write & Blog
Grab My Button!
