Author Archives: Verla Viera

In my last post, I talked about the word “merkin,” which is a wig for the pubic area. I came across the word in a Facebook post by a teenage acquaintance of mine, which read, “Paintball today. Merkin emm.” While … Continue reading →

Occasionally I go on a word journey and it takes me to very unexpected places. Sometimes I even cross my own path in these travels. That’s what happened this week. I had the occasion to look up two words that … Continue reading →

A special welcome to my new Northwest Linguist readers. Good to see you here! Recently I’ve been watching a lot of episodes of one of my favorite shows, Forensic Files. When I first discovered it a few years ago, I … Continue reading →

It makes me slightly nervous when someone is described as enumerating something if she isn’t actually saying the numbers before mentioning each item on the list.

A couple of days ago, when I wrote the post about business and laziness, I mentioned that I had learned the word “otiose,” which means being at leisure, ineffective, or useless. While I was in the dictionary looking for related … Continue reading →