Words

If you are anything like me, then your feelings about the city - this city, any city - are bittersweet. As you peer over your shoulder while walking down an unfamiliar street or lock yourself in for the evening, you have some idea, right or wrong, of what a stranger might do. You hope for the best and brace for the worst, as I did six months ago when I began this column. Back then, I had my own ideas about how many people would read it, what percentage might bother to write, and how many of them would do so only because I'd ticked them off. All of my guesses were wrong.

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: GIT No, not the rural American imperative of get , but the British slang for "a worthless person. " The etymology is interesting; the word derives from the old word get , "offspring. " When you beget , your get is what you get, your begotten . Git is, for those fond of British slang (and who isn't?

Like other editors, I lead a quiet life, making the daily round from home to paragraph factory and back. Excitement is something I encounter at a remove. So it was from I tweet that I discovered that there is a raging hubbub about literally , including some heavy breathing at Buzzfeed , where someone has been reading the dictionary.  An article by Jessica Misener, "The Wrong Definition Of 'Literally' Is Literally Going In The Dictionary,"  is aghast that those craven lexicographers are listing literally  is used for humorous or emphatic effect, meaning not literally but figuratively.  Well, chill.  Would you think, if someone said, "I was so angry my head literally exploded," that it was time to hire someone to steam the bone fragments and tissue spatter from the wallpaper?

I would like to commend the Howard County Times and the Baltimore Sun for having the courage to publish the OpEd piece by Maria Santo, "Murder is not condoned by civilized societies; abortion should be illegal," which appeared in the Feb. 28 print edition. Abortion is a sensitive topic and Ms Santo presented a calm, compassionate, yet forceful defense for life. Her eloquence presents a compelling challenge to our culture to step back and honestly...

A bonus word of the week for you, at the urging of colleagues: OMNIBIBULOUS T his worthy word has not found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary . It was coined by H.L. Mencken, an inveterate foe of Prohibition and a stout defender of his Twenty-first Amendment rights. Here is what he writes in Minority Report : "One of the fellows I can't understand is the man with violent likes and dislikes in his drams--the man who dotes on highballs but can't abide malt liquor, or who drinks white wine but not red, or who holds that Scotch whiskey benefits his kidneys whereas rye whiskey corrodes his liver.

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar - another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: - See more at: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-in-a-word-subfusc-20130219,0,1370566.story#sthash.2Canyfd4.dpuf Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar - another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary.

SARASOTA, Fla. -- Adam Jones is in one of his moods and it's hard to blame him. The Orioles did what many thought would be impossible in 2012. They ended a string of 14 straight losing seasons and played all the way into October before losing a very tight American League Division Series to the New York Yankees. So why is everybody so convinced that they will stumble back to mediocrity this year? Why are the so-called experts and oddsmakers setting the bar so low when the Orioles have basically the same team back and have a chance to get much more from several key players who were injured in 2013?

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar - another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: SUBFUSC Granted, it's mainly British, but it has it uses.  Subfusc  (pronounced sub-FUSK or SUB-fusk, and you're probably not going to use it in speech anyhow) started out meaning "dull in color,"  "dark," or "dusky. " But "dull in color" suggested metaphoric possibilities, and in time subfusc  was seen to have literary possibilities, standing in for "gloomy" and "somber.

Johns Hopkins is two days away from its season and home opener against Siena, and one of the few questions facing the Blue Jays is the status of senior midfielder John Greeley, who tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in an 8-2 loss to Navy on April 21. Greeley, who underwent surgery on the knee in May, has been cleared to practice and is participating fully, but coach Dave Pietramala said he hasn't made any determination on whether...

We copy editors like to think of ourselves as guarantors of accuracy, protectors of the reader, guardians of the language, and other noble roles. But the plain fact is that our basic task is to keep people from making asses of themselves in public.  Now, of course, our numbers are much diminished, something like half of the nation's newspaper copy editors having lost their jobs in the past decade . (Of course, not all of them are selling their plasma today, many contriving to make a living as freelance editors.)