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Janelle
Janelle is 50% done with Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds
This one sounds far too fanciful to be true, but I assure you it is an eponym: Sideburns are named after the resplendent and voluminous whiskers of Union Civil War general Ambrose E. Burnside. Starting around the 1870s, they were called “burnsides,” but shortly thereafter, the words were transposed.
4 hours, 51 min ago Add a comment
Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds

Janelle
Janelle is 41% done with Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds
The word meme is modeled after the word “gene” because of the way memes spread and evolve. It was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
5 hours, 55 min ago Add a comment
Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds

Janelle
Janelle is 39% done with Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds
…from the Arabic mata “he died,” which also appears in the phrase shah mat “the king died”—the source of the word “checkmate,” after some folk etymology adaptations to English spelling.
6 hours, 1 min ago Add a comment
Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds

Janelle
Janelle is 36% done with Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds
..River Avon”means“River River”because“Avon”comes from a Welsh word for river,&..Connecticut River is similarly pleonastic because “Connecticut”is from a Mohican word meaning“at the long tidal river.” ..the Sahara Desert(Sahara is a transliteration of the Arabic word for“desert”—thus,the “desert desert”)&the Faroe Islands(from the Faroese word Føroyar,which already means“sheep island”—thus,the“sheep island islands”)
6 hours, 11 min ago Add a comment
Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds

Janelle
Janelle is 33% done with Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds
A similar example of a geographical kadigan is “the boondocks” or, in short, “the boonies” as a word for a rural area. It’s from the Tagalog word bundok, meaning “mountain,” which American soldiers borrowed while stationed in the Philippines as a word meaning “a wild, remote place.”
6 hours, 29 min ago Add a comment
Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds

Janelle
Janelle is 27% done with Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds
In Middle English, island was spelled yland.The root of the first part of the word means “water,” so island literally means “water-land”..It does not share a root with the word isle, which is from Old French and ultimately from the Latin insula. But people assumed, based on pronunciation and the overlap in meaning, that yland and isle were related, and so they essentially became a portmanteau in the form of “island.”
6 hours, 56 min ago Add a comment
Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds

Janelle
Janelle is 4% done with Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds
…But feist as a word for a small dog is a shortened version of the Middle English phrase fysting curre—that is, feisting cur.A cur is a dog, and “fysting” meant “stinking” but literally “farting” or “breaking wind.”Thus, to be feisty is to be like a stinky, farty little mutt dog.
Oct 30, 2025 07:20PM Add a comment
Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds

Janelle
Janelle is 41% done with Cousin Bette
Women always persuade men that they are lions, with a will of iron, when they are making sheep of them.
Oct 29, 2025 10:44PM Add a comment
Cousin Bette

Janelle
Janelle is 39% done with Cousin Bette
His forehead, projecting like a satyr’s, a sign of obstinate tenacity in passion, was surmounted by a jet-black head of springing hair like a virgin forest, below which a pair of clear eyes glittered, so tawny and untamed as to make it seem credible that his mother when carrying him had been frightened by a jaguar.
Oct 29, 2025 09:34PM Add a comment
Cousin Bette

Janelle
Janelle is 90% done with The Curse of the Cole Women
Once again, as always, the angry, scared men of Juniper killed the Cole women rather than face themselves and their actions. And men like him would never pay.
Oct 28, 2025 10:56PM Add a comment
The Curse of the Cole Women

Janelle
Janelle is 35% done with Cousin Bette
Hulot, during this period, was one of those fine human ruins whose virility asserts itself in a kind of bushy growth of hair from ears and nose and fingers, like the moss springing up on the almost indestructible monuments of the Roman Empire.
Oct 27, 2025 07:49PM Add a comment
Cousin Bette

Janelle
Janelle is 34% done with Cousin Bette
Complicity in vice, remember this, is the real Holy Alliance in Paris. Men pursuing some financial interest in the end break away from one other; those with a vice have always a common interest.
Oct 27, 2025 07:38PM Add a comment
Cousin Bette

Janelle
Janelle is 33% done with Cousin Bette
But the sweetly prim respectability, the outer semblance of virtue, the hypocritical ways of a married woman who never spends anything, apparently, but the day-to-day housekeeping expenses, who demurs at any show of extravagance, lead men to unsignposted, unspectacular ruin, ruin all the stranger because the victim finds excuses, and cannot find a cause for his disaster.
Oct 27, 2025 07:30PM Add a comment
Cousin Bette

Janelle
Janelle is 25% done with Cousin Bette
The great men&women of the Empire,in their follies,rivalled the great aristocrats of the old régime.Under the Restoration the aristocracy has always remembered having been persecuted&robbed, &so,..become economical,careful,&provident: in fact bourgeois&inglorious.Now,1830 has completed the work of 1793. … from now on,there will be great names but no more great houses..Everything bears the stamp of personal interest.
Oct 26, 2025 10:23PM Add a comment
Cousin Bette

Janelle
Janelle is on page 205 of 304 of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
The expectation that Palestinians must always be resilient is dehumanizing. Narratives of perpetual resilience can gloss over the brutality of colonial oppression and reduce the complexity of the violence that Palestinians endure.
Oct 25, 2025 07:59PM Add a comment
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Janelle
Janelle is on page 167 of 304 of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
Media blackout: International journalists and investigators are banned, making this genocide largely unseen by the world.

Aid restrictions: Gaza is blockaded by land, sea, and air. The very state responsible for the genocide controls humanitarian aid entry.

Targeting of aid workers: Rescue workers, healthcare providers, and journalists are being killed at unprecedented rates.
Oct 25, 2025 07:24PM Add a comment
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Janelle
Janelle is on page 167 of 304 of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
Gaza is different than other conflict areas I’ve worked in in several ways. Demographics: The violence indiscriminately targets civilians of all ages and genders.
Entrapment: Unlike in other war zones, Gazans cannot flee. There ’s no safe zone. So-called safe zones where civilians are forcibly transferred have repeatedly been targeted by the Israeli military.
Oct 25, 2025 07:23PM Add a comment
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Janelle
Janelle is 8% done with Cousin Bette
A peasant girl from the Vosges, with everything that that implies: thin, dark, with glossy black hair, heavy eyebrows meeting across the nose in a tuft, long and powerful arms, and broad solid feet, with some warts on her long, simian face: there is a quick sketch of the spinster.
Oct 23, 2025 04:28AM Add a comment
Cousin Bette

Janelle
Janelle is on page 120 of 304 of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
By the end of June 2024, approximately 83% of all plant life and 70% of farmland had been destroyed in Gaza,
Oct 22, 2025 07:32PM Add a comment
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Janelle
Janelle is 3% done with Cousin Bette
Nearly all men cherish a fondness for some posture that they think shows off to best advantage the good points with which nature has endowed them. In Crevel’s case this pose consisted in crossing his arms like Napoleon, turning his head to show a three-quarter profile, and gazing, as the artist painting his portrait had made him gaze, at the horizon.
Oct 22, 2025 05:31AM Add a comment
Cousin Bette

Janelle
Janelle is 15% done with Legacy (Martin Scarsden, #4)
If anyone thinks of Martin Scarsden nowadays, they think of the actor who plays him on TV, the good looking rooster with the curly black hair, not him.
Oct 16, 2025 04:11AM Add a comment
Legacy (Martin Scarsden, #4)

Janelle
Janelle is on page 91 of 304 of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
And how does one see video after video without concluding that this cruelty is the point, that there is no bottom to Israel’s campaign of extermination?
Oct 15, 2025 08:23PM Add a comment
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Janelle
Janelle is 57% done with Farewell, My Lovely (Philip Marlowe, #2)
‘Who is this Hemingway person at all?’
‘A guy who keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.’
Oct 12, 2025 10:09PM Add a comment
Farewell, My Lovely (Philip Marlowe, #2)

Janelle
Janelle is 38% done with Farewell, My Lovely (Philip Marlowe, #2)
I left her laughing. The sound was like a hen having hiccups.
Oct 10, 2025 10:17PM Add a comment
Farewell, My Lovely (Philip Marlowe, #2)

Janelle
Janelle is on page 30 of 304 of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
The dehumanization of Palestinians is so thoroughly pervasive and so unquestioningly echoed by Western leaders that any effort to challenge Israel’s system of domination is met with perplexed reactions and uniform condemnation.
Oct 10, 2025 09:01PM Add a comment
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Janelle
Janelle is on page 21 of 304 of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
This historical context underscores that what is happening in Gaza and Palestine today is not an aberration but a continuation of a settler-colonial project that began over a century ago.
Oct 10, 2025 06:11AM Add a comment
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Janelle
Janelle is on page 17 of 304 of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
While Western double standards may come as no surprise, the degree to which this genocide has not only been downplayed but also actively facilitated is shocking for many. ……….Yet it feels naive, particularly when considering the context of entwined forces of imperial interests, white supremacy, and settler colonialism—dynamics that have long provided the Israeli regime with sweeping impunity.
Oct 10, 2025 06:06AM Add a comment
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Janelle
Janelle is on page 8 of 304 of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
This collection of testimonies is intended as a record of the human toll of the genocide—a way to ensure that neither the violence nor its many victims are forgotten. By also chronicling the devastation inflicted on land, animals, infrastructure, education, and the environment, we aim to show how Israel attacked everything that sustains human life in Palestine.
Oct 10, 2025 05:59AM Add a comment
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Janelle
Janelle is on page 506 of 829 of Martin Chuzzlewit
.extraordinary people you are!’cried Martin.‘Are Mr Chollop&the class he represents,an Institution here?Are pistols with revolving barrels, sword-sticks,bowie knives,&such things,Institutions on which you pride yourselves?Are bloody duels,brutal combats,savage assaults,shootings down&stabbing in the streets,your Institutions!Why,I shall hear next,that Dishonour&Fraud are among the Institutions of the great republic!’
Oct 01, 2025 05:54AM Add a comment
Martin Chuzzlewit

Janelle
Janelle is on page 67 of 185 of Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher, #1)
‘Indeed, ma’am, and why should he not spend it on drink? Would you deprive the poor, whose lives are bad and miserable and comfortless enough, of the solace of a little relief from grinding poverty? A sordid, sodden relief perhaps, but would you be so heartless as to deny the poor even that pleasure in which all of us indulge at your generous expense?’
Sep 25, 2025 09:06PM Add a comment
Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher, #1)

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