There is a certain satisfaction in catching someone in a contradiction they didn’t know they were making.

Recently, someone online complained that the Pope should not be pontificating. Yes, you read that correctly. They probably meant that he was being overbearing; they probably did not mean to observe that the Pope was doing exactly what a pontiff does — and indeed, what the word was built to describe.

Pontificate comes directly from pontifex, the Latin title for a Roman priest — and later, of course, the Bishop of Rome himself. The pontifex was, etymologically, a “bridge-builder”: pons (bridge) + facere (to make). Whether the original priests were literal engineers of Roman infrastructure or whether the bridge was always metaphorical — a span between the human and divine — remains debated. What is not debated is that when the pontifex spoke, he spoke with the full weight of sacred authority.

So yes: the Pope was pontificating. Quite correctly.

But he is hardly alone in this etymological entrapment.

Dictators, we are told, are the great villains of political history. The word itself has become a slur. Yet the Roman dictator was a legal office — an emergency magistrate appointed by the Senate in times of crisis, given extraordinary powers for a period not exceeding six months.

The root is simply dicere: to say, to declare. The dictator was, at his origin, merely the one whose word was law. That the word degraded alongside the office is a study in how language absorbs history’s disappointments.

A president presides. This is almost too obvious to mention, and yet how rarely we notice it. From praesidere, to sit before, to sit at the head. The president is literally the one who takes the chair at the front of the room. (Students of leadership will note that the chair one chooses or is given says everything.)

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In his letters, Gustave Flaubert wrote:

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”

Read to live.

Books are voyages of discovery. And with them, you can get your passport stamped on destinations around the world and throughout all of time.

See the fog-enshrouded streets of Victorian London, walk the newly-laid cobblestones of the Via Appia in the second century BC, experience Hemingway’s Spanish bullrings of the 1920s, and smell the air in James Fennimore Cooper’s Mohican country of the 1750s.

“I have a passport to a far better age, As close as the bookshelf, as near as a page.”
— William Schweikert, 19841

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Destination Unknown

But here is what no one puts on the passport application: the best destinations are the ones you never planned to visit.

There is a particular species of joy that belongs exclusively to the browser — the person who wanders into a used bookstore without a list, who runs a finger along the spines of water-damaged paperbacks in a church basement sale, who follows a footnote into a wing of the library where the lights flicker on only when you walk in.

This is the joy of the unexpected find: the serendipitous shelf.

The algorithms, of course, have no interest in such visceral joy. They can’t smell the sweet elixir made from decaying pages, giving off the scent of vanilla, almonds, and musty paper.2 Or feel the thrill of finding a volume that has been like a white whale to you.

No, the algorithms are curators of the confirmed, showing you what you already like, amplified. They mistake your history for your appetite. And so, over time, the recommendation engine narrows the aperture of what you might ever encounter. You are given a library, but it is a library with walls closing slowly inward.

The Alternative

The solutions are many: the used bookstore, the public library’s discard bin, the estate sale with three tables of paperbacks at a quarter each, where a cracked spine catches your eye and you open to a random page and find a sentence that speaks directly to something you have been trying to think through for weeks.

I have found my best books this way. Not the ones I was looking for. The ones that found me.

There is something almost mystical in the encounter. The book has been waiting — sometimes for decades — and you have arrived, at last, to collect it.

A two-volume set on the essays and letters of E.B. White. A children’s natural history from 1887 with illustrations so alive they seem ready to leap from the foxed pages. A copy of a book already in my collection, but this one with an inscription to a titan of our shared hobby, making it a valuable association copy that comes with a story.

None of these would have appeared in a “You might also enjoy...” carousel. All of them changed how I think.

And now, for those of us who cannot always make it to the physical stacks, I have found something wonderful I’d like to share with you — a digital equivalent of reaching blindly into the dark and pulling out something extraordinary.

🔒 The rest of post is for paid subscribers.

What follows is a tour of one of the most delightful tools I’ve encountered for the purposeful wanderer with a curious mind. There’s a reason the most interesting minds you’ve ever met have usually read the most improbable things.

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Paid subscribers also receive access to the full archive, the fortnightly Off the Clock letter on language and history, and all future essays. The cost is less than a used paperback a month — and considerably more surprising.

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Earlier this week, we had a musical interlude with John Williams, applying his collaboration style with some of the principles behind Working Together.

Now, were doing a variation on a theme and heading to the side-door of music1 to connect music and language.

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Music predates the spoken word. Before humans agreed on names for things, they sang. The oldest instruments we have found — bone flutes carved from vulture wings, some 40,000 years old — tell us that the impulse to organize sound into meaning is not a late refinement of civilization but one of its foundations. Pythagoras heard mathematics in harmony and believed that the universe itself moved according to musical ratios.

We speak of music as a universal language, which is true enough, but also incomplete. Music is not merely like language; in many ways, it is language. It has structure and syntax, phrasing and punctuation. A melody travels where words cannot — across borders, across generations, across moments when speech fails us entirely.

What’s remarkable is not just that music communicates, but that it connects. A song heard at the right moment becomes a kind of shorthand between people: you hear this, too. You feel this too.

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Verbal and written language, by contrast, is a relative newcomer: powerful, and in certain respects a poorer cousin of music. Precise in a way that we can all agree on definitions; imprecise when taken out of context.

But perhaps the deepest evidence that music is a language is this: it has given us words we cannot do without. Music’s influence can be felt in terms so embedded in the way we describe conflict and cooperation, pace and proportion, that we no longer hear the melody behind them. We have become fluent in musical metaphor without ever having studied the instrument.

Musical Terms in Our Language

To read the full breakdown of how these terms shape our reality, upgrade to a paid subscription to the & Guild.2

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Welcome to Off the Clock — the Saturday bonus from Timeless & Timely where history, language, and the occasional rabbit hole collide. Arrives every other Saturday.

If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here — and you probably should.

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Foxtrot. Tango. Zulu. The news from the Middle East arrives in fragments — dispatches clipped by distance, politics, and the fog of war.

Somewhere over a headset or radio, someone is spelling something out: coordinates, call signs, perhaps a pilot confirming a target or a controller confirming an aircraft. In those moments, language becomes a matter not of poetry, but of precision.

And the words coming out of their mouth have a surprisingly modern origin. War is ancient. The alphabet it uses is not.

The problem is simple: on a battlefield or in a cockpit, letters are unreliable things. B, D, P, and T dissolve into one another when shouted through static, engine noise, or the general chaos of combat.

A single misunderstood letter can move a plane miles off course.

So militaries came up with an elegant workaround: replace each letter with a full word. Simple in theory.

In practice, agreeing on which words took about 40 years… and two world wars.

And the words we use today — Alfa, Bravo, Charlie — are not the ones the soldiers of World War II used at all.

The modern phonetic alphabet is the result of wartime improvisation, linguistic research, and one very unusual international experiment.

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Some days, it feels like the world’s headlines are written in a language of fracture — pieces of news so discordant that even the syntax aches under their weight.

We see suffering in large numbers, conflict breaking over families and communities, and a sense that ugliness has come out of its corners and taken center stage. Was it always thus, we wonder.

But even there, in the tangle of human struggle, language reminds us of something true: beauty can exist alongside chaos. Not in naïve denial, but in the quiet constancy of words that have stood across centuries. Words that carry not only definitions, but echoes of a gentle breeze on a summer day, the hush of early dawn, and the sound of a voice we loved long after it is gone.

Writers and linguists have long marveled at the way certain words seem to resonate deeper than others, not just for what they mean, but for how they sound in our minds and mouths. 1

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Some have suggested criteria for this feeling: a blend of rhythm, soft consonants, and a melodic flow that makes the word itself seem like a kind of small music. Linguist Dr. Robert Beard compiled a list of The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. (Amazon | Bookshop.org)

Seven Beautiful Words

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The practice of American politicians draping themselves in the vestments of religious authority has become as reliable as the changing of the seasons, and nearly as empty of surprise.

Watch them gather at prayer breakfasts1 and evangelical convocations, these temporal princes clutching their Bibles like talismans against electoral misfortune, invoking the Almighty with the practiced ease of carnival barkers calling the credulous to their tents.

They speak of compassion while slashing programs for the indigent, of biblical justice while stuffing the courts with judges devoted to the privileges of wealth, of loving thy neighbor while building walls both literal and legislative to keep the desperate and dispossessed at comfortable distance.

The hypocrisy is so richly textured, so magnificently shameless, that one almost admires the theatrical audacity of it — the president who quotes the Sermon on the Mount while cutting taxes for plutocrats, the senator who invokes Jesus’s care for the least among us while voting to strip health coverage from millions.

What makes this species of fraud so durable is not its subtlety but its usefulness to both the deceiver and the deceived.

The politician requires the moral legitimacy that religious language confers, that sacred vocabulary transforming greed into stewardship, cruelty into tough love, and indifference into divine providence. The congregation of voters, meanwhile, receives permission to believe that their prejudices are principles and their resentments are righteous.

It is a transaction conducted in the bright currency of faith but denominated in the base metal of power. Both parties to the bargain understand perfectly well that God, should He exist and concern Himself with such matters, would more likely be found among the money-changers being driven from the temple than among those doing the driving for cameras and campaign contributions.

The very language of scripture has receded from common usage — not necessarily because we the people are unfamiliar with it, but rather due to the centuries-old tome finding new language and new audiences in successive generations. What once worked for King James now requires modernization, leaving certain words in the dust bin (or at least in the recesses of our TikTok-fueled scrolling minds).

Old Words, Modern Concepts

While usage of these terms may have slipped, the meanings are far from archaic, indicating a certain sense of timeless human nature that can be translated from the original Hebrew and Aramaic:

Abase

To humble or degrade oneself, to bring low in position or estimation. The biblical injunction to abase oneself before God has been neatly inverted by our political class, who abase themselves before donors and focus groups while adopting postures of swaggering certainty before the divine.

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As someone who is interminably interested in words, I’m always looking for ways to expand my vocabulary.

The trouble with writing a newsletter that asks people to think and to learn is that there is a temptation to err on the side of erudition and showcase my dialectical prowess.

While such a mellifluous spectacle might delight the similarly-inclined, the goal here is to learn together. To ignore that is simply rude.

I had heard the word perfidious long before I understood it. It was one of those terms that floated in the air of educated disapproval — an appropriately dressed up term of reproach. I knew what it meant, or thought I did: faithless, not to be trusted. It dripped of reproach.

What I did not know — until just last week — was that perfidy is not merely a moral judgment but a legal one. Not a flourish. A term of art.1

In the law of war, perfidy describes a very specific offense: the use of deception to induce an enemy to believe you are protected under the laws of war — civilian, wounded, medical, or surrendering — and then killing them once they rely on it.

In other words, it names a crime committed not just against an opponent, but against the idea that rules mean anything at all. Perfidy is one of the most serious violations of the laws governing the use of military forces.

That led, as it almost always does, down a rabbit hole. This one was tinged with words for wickedness, and I thought we might explore some polite terms for disgraceful conduct together.

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A Lexicon of Disrepute

Treachery

Treachery refers to a deliberate and willful act of betraying trust and confidence. It signifies a conscious decision to violate a reliance or faith that was placed in someone. Examples include corporate espionage, betraying a business partner or financial misconduct.2

Knavery

Knavery refers to dishonest or unscrupulous behavior—acts of trickery, deceit, or fraud. While it may sound somewhat archaic or literary, knavery represents a concept that is still in active practice.

For example, in politics, gerrymandering could be considered knavery, as electoral districts are manipulated to favor one party. In finance, contract knavery refers to deceptive practices in loan contracts where terms are added that unfairly harm the borrower, often without their awareness. And Ponzi schemes employ deceit for financial gain.

Skulduggery

Also spelled “skullduggery,” it is underhanded or unscrupulous behavior, or a devious device or trick. The word originated from Scottish slang in the early 19th century, rooted in the idea of sneaky tricks or fraudulent dealings, often with a connotation of mischief or illicit activity.3

Villainy

Often implying more serious crimes or evil deeds, Merriam-Webster defines villainy as “the quality or state of being villainous : depravity.” Villainy and depravity abound of late.

Lèse-majesté: Treason and Sedition

The category of lèse-majesté is a crime committed against a sovereign power. Not the kind of crime like kidnapping a leader of a sovereign nation, but crimes like treason and sedition, which are two sides of the same coin.

Treason reason involves acts against one’s own country, while sedition refers to inciting rebellion against the government.4

Avarice / Rapaciousness

Both of these are associated with greed. Avarice is excessive or insatiable desire for wealth or profit, while rapacious is excessively grasping or covetous, to the point of being ravenous. As one might appear if one placed stolen assets in an offshore account, charged $1 billion for a membership fee, or decked out an office in gold.

Machination

A scheming or crafty action or artful design intended to accomplish some usually evil end. Something a cabal — or a board — might do.

Vituperation

When one vituperates, they’re uttering sustained and bitter railing and condemnation. Sometimes it may be well-grounded; other times, it may be delusional and completely outside of the realm of reality.

Impudent

Impudence is marked by contemptuous or cocky disrespect of others, expressed in very rude and insolent behavior. It is commonly seen in sociopathic narcissists.

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Well, I hope this journey on the dark side has been elucidating for you.

I think it was apparent to quite a few people across the globe this week as well.

There’s so much to learn,

Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

This one is free, so if you like what you see:

Join the hurdy-gurdy for the wordy nerdy

Hello, fellow word nerd.

Well, it’s that time of the year once again. The glorious season of the release of the Banished Words List.

This annual tradition, started by a fellow Baker Street Irregular and kinsprit Bill Rabe at Lake Superior State University, is now marking its Golden Anniversary — that’s right, the list has been around for 50 years.

If you’d like some history of this list and Bill’s creative brain, we have an exclusive interview with his son John:

Meanwhile, for the rest of us who want to know which of our friends require needling, here’s the 2026 version of the annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use, and General Uselessness, and this time, instead of editors’ commentary, we are treated to the commentary of those who wrote in to recommend each entry.

Be forewarned: this is a wide-ranging group of words and phrases, spanning from the mouths of babes (Gen Alpha) to dyed-in-the-wool corporate types. You may find yourself wincing at the very sight (or sound) of some of them.

And as usual, at the conclusion, I’ll make an attempt to use all of these in a sentence or two — although to be transparent, some of these will be a challenge.

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6-7 (six seven)

“There are six or seven reasons why this phrase needs to be stopped,” says Paul E. from WI. The volume of submissions for this one could have taken up the whole list, at least slots 6-7. The top banishment this year, Scott T. from UT adds, “it’s time for “6-7” to be 86’ed.”

Demure

“It’s very said more than very done, and we’re all very done hearing it!” remarks Tammy S. Often used in the phrase ‘very demure, very mindful,’ Madison C. shares that the overuse “waters down the real meaning.”

Cooked

“Hearing it…my brain feels ‘cooked,’” groans Zac A. from VA. Parents and guardians led the charge on this one, with some feeling this isn’t enough. James C. from WA suggests a ban of “all forms of the word cook,” hoping that hearing them will become rare.

Massive

“Way overused! (often incorrectly),” exclaim Don and Gail K. from MN. This word’s massive overuse has secured its place on this year’s list.

Incentivize

In the longstanding effort to turn nouns into verbs, this is another culprit. Two separate submissions likened hearing this word to “nails on a chalkboard.” Patricia from TX asks, “What’s wrong with motivate?”

Full stop

“For the same reason ‘period’ was banished…redundant punctuation,” explains Marybeth A. from OR.

Perfect

“There are very few instances when the word actually applies,” notes Jo H. from CA. Often heard during customer service interactions, Char S. from OH wonders: “How do they know it’s perfect…what does that mean?”

Gift/gifted (as a verb)

“I found this on the 1994 list, but it will make me feel better to recommend that it be included once again,” reveals James S. from OK. Another case of a noun being used as a verb.

My Bad

In the 1998 banishment, Elizabeth P. from MI suggested, “students and adults sound infantile when using this to apologize.” The phrase hasn’t matured in credibility since then. Andrea R. from OH shared, “It does not convey much meaning in the way of an apology.”

Reach Out

First banished in 1994, this saying has strayed from the positive message it once intended to deliver. “What started as a phrase with emotional support overtones has now become absurdly overused,” asserts Kevin B. from the United Kingdom.

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You can find the original announcement from LSSU here.

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If Timeless & Timely is where we wrestle with leadership, culture, and conscience, Off the Clock is where we loosen the tie, wander into the stacks, and remind ourselves that the words we use contain multitudes.

In 2025, these fortnightly excursions formed something of a map: not linear, not orderly, but revealing. Taken together, the year’s entries show how language carries memory, mischief, power, and occasionally, outright nonsense.

What follows is a look back at the year, not chronologically, but thematically — because words, like people, prefer to travel in company.

I. The Playful Anarchy of Language

Several entries delighted in language misbehaving — refusing symmetry, order, or logic.

• Peculiar Plurals

• Irreversible Binomials

• Unpaired Words

• Janus Words

These pieces explored linguistic asymmetry: plurals that won’t singularize, pairs that refuse reversal, words that carry opposite meanings depending on context. Together, they form a quiet rebuke to anyone who insists language should be tidy.

English, we’re reminded, is not a system so much as a long-running argument.

II. Punctuation, Grammar, and the Cult of Correctness

A smaller but sharper cluster examined our obsession with mechanical precision:

• Semicolonoscopy

• No. More. Periods.

• Mnemonic Devices

These essays weren’t anti-grammar; they were anti-sanctimony. They asked a simple question: when does correctness stop serving clarity and start serving ego? The answer, it turns out, is somewhere around the third unnecessary semicolon.

III. Lists, Curiosities, and Lexical Cabinetry

Some entries leaned into the joy of collection:

• Great Big Beautiful List of Useless Words

• Free Resources for Readers

• Banished Words for 2025

These were acts of preservation and play — proof that not everything needs to be useful to be worth keeping. In an economy obsessed with optimization, this may have been the most quietly subversive theme of the year.

IV. Power, Persuasion, and the Language of Authority

Several essays traced the role of words in the acquisition and even the abuse of power:

• The King’s English and the Tyranny of Proper Speech

• The Genealogy of Snake Oil

• How Drugs Are Named

Here, language wasn’t whimsical; it was strategic. These pieces examined how authority hides in accents, how persuasion dresses itself as expertise, and how naming can be an act of both clarity and deception.

The lesson was implicit but unmistakable: pay attention to who gets to name things, and why.

V. Literature, Rhetoric, and Verbal Craft

A number of entries returned us to the pleasures of well-made language:

• Solemn Sound, Sculpted Sentences

• That’s Intense

• Shakespearean Insults, Parts I & II

These were celebrations of rhetoric — not as ornament, but as force. From Shakespeare’s inventive invective to the muscular beauty of carefully constructed prose, the message was clear: words matter not just for what they say, but for how they sound and strike.

VI. History, Memory, and the Calendar

Finally, a handful of essays anchored language in time and tradition:

• Old Thoughts for Christmas

• Labor Day Quotes

• A Taste of Immortality

• A Reflective Oddity

• The Chaos

These pieces treated words as artifacts — carriers of collective memory, ritual, and seasonal meaning. They reminded us that language doesn’t just describe history; it participates in it.

What the Year Revealed

Taken together, Off the Clock in 2025 suggested a few enduring truths: that language resists control, finding a home in our eyes, ears, and mouths; that authority often hides in carefully scripted places; and that play is not the opposite of seriousness, but helps us identify what we should take seriously.

Mostly, though, the year affirmed the value of slowing down long enough to notice the words we use every day, and the ones we’ve forgotten, misused, or taken for granted.

As the clock ticks forward, these essays remain what they were intended to be: small invitations to curiosity, tucked into the margins of your busy world.

And if you found yourself pausing, smiling, or thinking, “I never noticed that before,” then Off the Clock did its job.

Let me know which was a personal favorite of yours in the comments section.

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Until next year…

There’s so much to learn,

In the spirit of the holiday season, I’ve lifted the paywall on this entry of Off the Clock. I’d encourage you to join so you don’t miss the next one.

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Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

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If you were around these parts in June, I wrote an entry for Off the Clock called Unpaired Words, which included words such as overwhelm, nonplussed, and far-fetched.

Thanks to a comment by & Guild member Curtis Armstrong on that entry, we have a follow-up piece:

“I started this morning really gruntled. Thanks to this column I am feeling just as plussed as all get out. (Whatever “all get out” means. Possible topic for a future Saturday...)”

In reading his comment, I realized that after hearing that phrase for what amounts to my whole life, I wasn’t quite sure about its origins myself. Down the rabbit-hole I went — and I’m bringing you with me.

Every language has its way of turning the volume knob all the way up. In American English, one of the quirkiest dials is the phrase “as all get-out.” It’s the kind of intensifier that makes you lean in, grin, and wonder: get out of what, exactly?

The phrase popped up in the mid‑19th century, first in Joseph Neal’s Charcoal Sketches in 1838.1

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Souls savor the sibilant sling of similar sounds, seeing in it a secret scaffold of subtlety, a soundscape of symmetry. So simple, such repetition sustains rhythm, stirs memory, sharpens meaning — and so we start this story of syllables seemingly spun in silver.

Alliteration, the deliberate repetition of consonant or vowel sounds at the beginnings of closely positioned words or stressed syllables, has long enchanted poets, orators, and writers. This rhetorical and poetic figure is more than just decorative — it organizes sound, accentuates meaning, and enlivens language.

It’s a mnemonic device, a sonic ornament, and a structural principle all at once.

Below, we’ll explore the history of alliteration, some examples in literature, a prominent current usage, and why alliteration matters.

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A Brief History of Alliteration

The history of alliteration stretches back to the earliest literatures. The term itself comes from the Latin littera, meaning “letter,” and was first used by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano in the fifteenth century.1

But the technique is much older. In Old English poetry — Beowulf being the most famous example — alliterative verse was the foundational metrical form. During the Middle English “Alliterative Revival” (c. 1350–1500), poets returned to that tradition, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where alliteration supplies both musicality and structure.2

Spanning from the classical Latin poets like Virgil and Lucretius to the Renaissance, alliteration was used to great effect. Today, alliteration lives on not only in poetry but in prose, advertising, political speech, and headlines.

Its pervasiveness underscores its enduring power: repetition of sound remains a deeply human way to make language memorable.

Examples of Alliteration in Literature

Here are a few striking examples of alliteration from literary texts:

1. Beowulf (Old English epic)

In this poem, lines are structured in two halves (half-lines) linked by alliterative sounds. For example:

“Many a treasure fetched from far was freighted with him.”

The repetition of the f sound (“fetched from far … freighted with him”) is characteristic of alliterative verse, giving the language a strong oral and rhythmic quality.

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It began, as so many historical inquiries do, with a late night snack.

Last night, while raiding the remains of the Halloween loot, I unwrapped a Baby Ruth candy bar,1 and somewhere between the caramel and the guilt, I wondered: who was Baby Ruth?

The short answer: probably not Babe Ruth, though the Curtiss Candy Company would have liked the confusion. They claimed it was named for President Grover Cleveland’s daughter Ruth, who’d been dead for 17 years when the candy debuted.2 Sweet history, indeed.

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That got me thinking: how many of the foods we eat every day carry someone’s name — a little edible monument to human vanity, ingenuity, or just plain luck? The history of these named dishes must be packed with some combination of practicality and comedy.

From dukes to doctors, divas to diplomats, the menu reads like a guest list at a particularly eccentric dinner party. Pull up a chair for these — you’re in good company (except perhaps #4).

Eight Dishes Named for Real People

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1. Carpaccio: A Painter’s Palette

Our first course is as refined as it is raw. In 1950, Giuseppe Cipriani — founder of Harry’s Bar in Venice3 — created a dish of thinly sliced raw beef drizzled with a creamy mustard sauce for a patron who couldn’t eat cooked meat. The bright red of the beef reminded him of the crimson hues favored by Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio, who lived some four centuries earlier.4

As a bonus, Cipriani also created the Bellini, a cocktail made with Prosecco and peach nectar. Ever the art lover, he named it because its color reminded him of a painting by another local artist from the 15th century: Giovanni Bellini.5

2. Chateaubriand: The Romantic Roast

François-René de Chateaubriand was a French writer, diplomat, and all-around Romantic hero. The kind of man who could sigh meaningfully in iambic pentameter.6

His personal chef, Montmireil, supposedly devised a tenderloin preparation worthy of his employer’s sensibilities: a thick center-cut of beef roasted between two lesser pieces to retain its juices, then served with a rich wine sauce.

In the end, it’s hard to say which was more overdone — the prose or the beef.

3. Napoleon: Layers of Ambition

Ah, Napoleon. A man whose name evokes conquest, empire, and pastry. Pastry? The mille-feuille, or “thousand-leaf” puff pastry, became known as the Napoleon not for Bonaparte himself but likely for Naples (“Napolitain”) from which the style of dessert originated.7

Still, the association stuck. It’s easy to see why: many layers, delicate structure, and prone to collapse under pressure.

4. Graham Crackers: Sinless Snacking

You might want to sit down for this one, but preferably not at a campfire. The humble graham cracker began not as a vehicle for s’mores but as a weapon against sin — a specific kind of sin.

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Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

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This weekend, as millions take to the streets in the “No Kings” protests — a nationwide movement rejecting the idea of unchecked power, the spectacle of coronation, and authoritarian ascendancy — we are reminded of the power of language. The protest slogan itself, “No Kings,” is raw, direct, unadorned: a refusal of royal trappings and a claim for democracy.

When H. W. Fowler and his brother F. G. Fowler published The King’s English in 1906, they offered more than grammar lessons. They issued a manifesto for honesty in prose: a rebellion against pomposity, pretension, and the “weasel words” that drained speech of its moral vigor.

Their creed was simple: to write clearly is to think honestly. They believed that style revealed the soul; that sloppy language betrayed sloppy thought.

More than a hundred years later, their admonitions read like dispatches to our own digital age — an era as noisy, narcissistic, and imprecise as the one they scolded.

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Here are a few enduring highlights from The King’s English — lessons for those who still believe words matter.

1. Plain Words: The Republic of the Short and Simple

The Fowlers loathed verbal bloat. They ridiculed the bureaucrat who wrote,

“The state of Poland … has been of a far more serious nature than has been allowed to transpire.”

Their fix:

“More serious than has been admitted.”

Shorter. Sharper. Clearer.

The plain word, they said, is not vulgar — it’s democratic. The English language, like any healthy republic, works best when its servants speak plainly.

2. Mixed Meanings and Malaprops: The Comedy of Error

Every age has its verbal pratfalls. The Fowlers collected them like butterflies:

• Perspicuity (clearness) for perspicacity (insight).

• Complaisant (obliging) for complacent (self-satisfied).

• Demean oneself confused with demean (to degrade).

Each slip is a small act of unintended poetry — and a reminder that accuracy is the highest form of courtesy.

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Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

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When we last gathered under this banner, we dug into the origins of drug names. The intervening two weeks have done nothing to quell the public’s needless skepticism over one of the safest and most commonly used medical interventions, Tylenol.

Charles Baudelaire observed “Americans so dearly love to be fooled,” and his statement is no less true today than it was in the mid-19th century. At the same time, Americans have consistently developed new and ever-more creative ways to dupe each other ever since the cry of “Westward, ho!” drove settlers across the Great Plains from sea to shining sea.

In that paradox lies the secret of “snake oil”: a phrase that conjures at once quack remedy, carnival huckster, and the wider theater of false promise.

The language we inherit often carries the residue of deception — words bearing scars of credulity, of hope, of persuasion gone awry.

From Vipers to Elixirs

To understand how “snake oil” became a byword for fraud, we must first travel to the dim reaches of folk medicine. In traditional Chinese medicine, oil made from certain water snakes was used to ease joint pain and inflammation.

That oil—rich in certain fatty acids—had modest physiological plausibility.1 Chinese laborers, migrating to the United States in the 19th century and especially into the Western frontier and railroad camps, carried with them their herbal lore and remedies—including snake oil.2

But once such remedies enter the marketplace, they invite corruption. What had been a modest tonic in immigrant enclaves was rebranded, massaged, and mythologized for frontier ears. The snake lost its authenticity, and the bottle acquired a narrative: “Here is the cure the white man never knew.”

Or, in the style of spectacle, a performer might slit open a rattlesnake onstage, boil it, and skims the oil, then promise that the same magic now lies in every vial. The narrative supplanted the substance.

The Rattlesnake King

The person most often associated with the vulgarization of snake oil is Clark Stanley, the self-styled “Rattlesnake King.”3 Around 1893, at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, Stanley staged a dramatic snake-slitting and boiling to demonstrate his liniment.4

Over time, the product he sold diverged entirely from its ostensible origins: a U.S. government analysis in 1916 discovered that the “snake oil” in his bottles was nothing more than mineral oil, beef fat, capsicum, and turpentine—none of it derived from snakes.5 He pled “nolo contendere” and was fined a modest sum (about $20).

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Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

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Rolling out of bed, you feel some aches and pains. Maybe you pulled a muscle and need a cream with some lidocaine. Perhaps your joints ache, causing you to reach for a bottle of acetaminophen or ibuprofen.

Whatever the causes of some health issues, we find solutions in chemical compounds with which the body interacts. We know them by their brand names and their generic names, but have you wondered how they got those names in the first place?

Potential drugs go through a rigorous safety review before approval — and so do their names. In order to avoid confusion with other similar drugs, according to Pfizer, “a single name for a drug candidate can take years to get approval from regulatory authorities, in an entirely separate process from the approval of the drug, itself.”1

Eliminating Confusion

When scientists discover that a potential drug that holds promise, the naming processes begins with the generic name. In 1961, the United States created an organization called the United States Adopted Names Council (USAN) to oversee the naming process.2

The FDA joined the USAN in 1967 and coordinates with the World Health Organization’s International Nonproprietary Names Programme (INN) to ensure the drug's generic name is globally consistent. This universal name allows individuals to access the medication by the same name, regardless of where they are in the world. This is particularly useful for travelers who may need to obtain their medication abroad.3

What’s in a Name

Generic drug names have two parts: a prefix and a suffix. The suffix acts as a scientific family name to describe the way the drug works in the body, while the prefix is often chosen to reflect the drug’s chemical structure or therapeutic class.

Generic Naming Requirements

A simple checklist outlines the process for selecting an appropriate name, guided by these necessities:

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Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

Usually, this is where we dig into words and their history. Rather than the usual etymological discourse, the recent Labor Day weekend afforded us a chance to reflect on its origins, peppered with observations and utterances about the nature of work.

The first Labor Day was marked in New York City in 1882, with a parade of some 15,000 marchers. The goal was to indicate the importance of workers in the Industrial Age.

The Industrial Age has given way to the Information Age, but the outputs of physical labor still happen with manufacturing and manual labor: our phones, our houses, and our transportation, despite encroaching automation, still require human hands to touch them, somewhere in the chain.

And those hands, tethered to an assembly line or a keyboard, serve a purpose, whether our own or someone else’s.

This is a fundamental drive of human existence: to live for a purpose.

In order to give a little purpose to Labor Day, I have assembled appropriate quotes for the occasion.

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Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

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Recent reports announce, almost like reporting quarterly company performance, that the time Americans devote to reading has suffered a collapse — down forty percent in the last two decades among U.S. adults 15 years and older.1

What once served as the quiet occupation of citizens in a republic of letters is now treated as the quaint pastime of antiquarians, as superfluous to modern life as the oil lamp or the fountain pen.

The rise of AI adds to the fuel of this conflagration of intellect, sparing us the trouble of sustained attention while entrusting the effort to some other entity that provides the erstwhile reader with summaries and interpretations, regurgitated as a mother bird does for her offspring.

The parallel to the mother bird regurgitating worms for her chicks is not accidental; it is the parable of our time. The difference, of course, is that the bird intends its sacrifice to nourish, whereas we seem content to be spoon-fed by devices whose interest lies not in our growth but in our sedation.2

As counsels, the defense against the algorithm is within our power if we begin each day with the simple act of reading:

Whether you choose to pick up a piece of fiction, a biography, a collection of essays or The Oxford Book of English Verse, the decision to eschew electrons for paper (or other electrons in an e-book reader) wards off brain rot.

More than keeping our most important organ from atrophying, reading gives us another power:

Ten Free Sites to Help with Your Reading Journey

1) Book Authority

It showcases the best books in over 4,000 categories including topics such as solopreneur, leadership, biography, folklore, language and writing, and much more. It is particularly useful for nonfiction readers.

2) The StoryGraph

This is a great Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. It shares many more stats about the books you read and has a variety of features that you won’t find with Goodreads.

3) Hoopla

Hoopla is your public library at your fingertips. All you need is a library card and you'll get free access to audiobooks, ebooks, comics, movies, magazines, and even music.

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Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

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The inimitable Tom Lehrer passed away on July 26, 2025 at the age of 97.

Lehrer had a profound impact on a few generations of people, due to his creative use of the language in song, first in his albums and tours and then in the songs he wrote specifically for the children’s television program Electric Company (including “Silent E,” “L-Y,” and others).1

In his spoken introduction for “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” (an alternative fight song for his alma mater), Lehrer made a clever plural out of a Latin singular:

“The days of my undergraduacy long ago when there used to be these very long Saturday afternoons in the fall with nothing to do — the library was closed — just waiting around for the cocktail parties to begin. And on occasions like that, some of us used to wander over to the... I believe it was called the stadium, to see if anything might be going on over there. And one did come to realize the football fight songs that one hears in comparable stadia have a tendency to be somewhat uncouth, and even violent, and that it would be refreshing, to say the least, to find one that was a bit more genteel.”

While stadia is an acceptable pluralization of stadium, it isn’t something we’re used to reading or hearing.

And in a language where the plural of deer is deer, the plural of moose is moose, and the plural of goose is geese, you never know what to expect.

What other unusual plurals are worth exploring? Let’s dive in.

Beeves

The plural of beef is beeves, but only when referring to cattle (as opposed to petty arguments). Makes sense, when you consider that hooves is the plural of hoof.

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Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

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There are certain two-word phrases we hear frequently that we’re used to hearing or reading in a certain order. These are called irreversible binomials.

These are phrases in which the words must appear in a particular order.

They become such a part of the vocabulary that it would seem odd to see or hear them in the opposite order. They go together like carrots and peas. Wait — that isn’t right, is it?

The term “irreversible binomial” was introduced by etymologist and philologist Yakov Malkiel in 1954. But the phenomenon had been discussed since at least 1903 under different names: a “terminological imbroglio.”1

In a previous edition of Off the Clock, I wrote About Ablauts, or the required order of similar sounding words from the same root. Like ping pong or flip flops. That was based on vowel order.

There is so such hard and fast rule with irreversible binomials; we simply say or write them in a particular order because that’s how they’ve become familiar phrases.

Psst. Hey, if you refer others here, you can earn free access to the & Guild—our members-only tier:

Refer a friend

Let’s explore some irreversible binomials and the reasons they exist. Maybe you can suggest more.

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