We all know the saying “Money is the root of all evil.” But that’s a famous or should I say infamous misquote of the King James Bible. The real quote is
For the love of money is the root of all evil. ~1 Timothy 6:10
Money itself is just a thing it’s what you will do to satisfy your lust for it that can be the evil.
We are all familar with the sideways eight representing infinity. It has become popluar in tattoos and jewelry. So much so we refer to it as the ‘infinity symbol.’ But saying that is going the long way around the barn, the symbol acutally has a name lemniscate. So next time you want a tattoo or bracelet ask for the lemniscate.
Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy. ~Groucho Marx
We’ve all done it. We’ve all stood looking at a map of a mall, amusement park, office complex and found the ‘you are here’ arrow. Except that arrow has a name and it’s not ‘you are here’ arrow.
I love quotes. I also love getting them correct. One credited to Greta Garbo is “I want to be alone” but actually that’s not correct. Even Ms. Garbo tried to set the record straight…
There are many ways to organize things. When it comes to colors I prefer to organize them like a rainbow. I find myself going over this menomic my 5th grade teacher taught me. I was surprised when I met some people who didn’t know it. So I share with you how to remember the order of the colors of a prism/rainbow.
You know the feeling – when you jump into or have cold water poured over you – that gasp, that surge, THAT feeling. What’s it called? Shock? no not quite you knew it was coming when you jumped. Well don’t worry language’s got you covered thanks to the Scottish there’s a word for that…
Some years ago I read a great essay about beginning writers trying too hard to make their characters unique. It was called or referred to the Mary Sue archetype as the ‘violet-eyed heroine.’ As I worked to improve my characters from dialog to depth I also wanted physical appearance that was reasonable. This means I want characters across a long story to have a good representative distribution of human features. Eye color is one, as eyes say a lot for people in body language. They are the windows of the soul after all. That led to research on the human eye. Here’s what I found about eye color and it’s distribution in world population. (more…)
I am of the feeling a house isn’t a home without at least ONE cat. Yet I was at a loss as to what I should call my group of feline furry babies. Then I found out and with that I found out what to call a group of feral felines because we all know the furry babies that purr on our beds are different from the wild ones that mouse the warehouse and run from humans. So what’s what when it comes to cats in groups? Let me tell you. (more…)
In this blog Wednesdays are about words. What are words in a blog without the characters that make up an alphabet? Which set me one day to thinking about the different alphabets in the world for various languages. I started doing some research and learned that there seems to be a sweet spot for the number of characters in a written language. Yet given that there is a great variation from 50,000 character alphabet to a 12 character one. What’s the outliers and what’s the sweet spot?
Mary Louise Eklund 