Opinion

I‘m going to lean on my three years of high school Latin to answer this question. I really wanted to make sure I was profiled as a giant nerd during my formative teen years, so I took a class where we got extra credit for wearing a homemade toga to school for an entire day. Let’s just say I got my extra credit.

My husband, Peter, is taking no chances. I knew this about him before I married him.

I have a new favorite word and, no, it’s not “hygge.” Similar to “hygge,” though, this word looks like you dropped a random handful of Scrabble letters onto the gameboard in an attempt to convince your friend that it’s a real word. My new favorite word is “phrop.” Coined by Sir Arnold Lunn in the late 1940s, “phrop” was Lunn’s entry in a made-up word competition in “The New Statesman,” according to Philip Howard in his 1984 book “The State of Language.” It seems Sir Arnold created the word “phrop” as a combination of the words “phrase” and “opposite.” When you break down this idea, you get a phrase that means the opposite of what it actually means.

It is an absolute pleasure for Amy and me to be back at The Sealy News! This is the community that we love, and we promise to do extraordinary things for the Austin County area. As most of you know, Amy Lieb is my oldest daughter and one of the best bookkeepers in the business.

Last week I wrote about the difference between “capital” and “capitol.” My research opened up a can of worms, which is what I wrote about two weeks ago. While researching when the word “capitol” needs to be capitalized I stumbled upon the topic of “capitonyms.”

I don’t remember exactly when I took to living in stretch pants full time. The process was gradual, I’m sure of that.

I’m astonished at how often the world of grammar intersects the headlines. Since the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, I’ve seen and heard people confused by both the spelling and the capitalization (seriously, no pun intended) of the word. Let’s dive in.

The twenty-first century is an uncharted landscape of post-post-modernism. Truth can be whatever we want it to be at any given moment — or whatever.