Mark in Bismarck, North Dakota, spent years as a sailor, and wonders about the term sea painter, meaning “a rope attached to a lifeboat.” Why painter? The word may derive from Middle French pendeur meaning “a kind of rope that hangs,” literally, something that suspends, from pendre, meaning “to hang,” a relative of such “hanging” words as pendant, pendulum, pending, and pendulous. The word painter took on the meaning of “a rope for hanging a boat onto the side of a ship.” Metaphorically, by extension to slip the painter or to cut the painter means “to break free.” This is part of a complete episode.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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