“Duplication” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “The action of doubling”. It has meanings relevant to biology (division into two), mathematics (multiplication by two and the problem […]
Columnists
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Pharmacographic
As I mentioned last week, when discussing the medical entries in Crooke’s 1903 edition of Yule and Burnell’s 1886 compilation Hobson–Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Medical Hobson–Jobson
Last week I discussed Hobson–Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. Although many have called Hobson-Jobson a dictionary, that […]
Nick Hopkinson: Against “stupidity” and the tyranny of merit
Albert Einstein’s observation, “two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe,” has been much cited since the emergence of […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Hobson–Jobson
During the recent debate about the use of the word “curry”, I looked it up in Hobson–Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, […]
Martin McKee on “Spike: The virus versus the people”
How was it that the United Kingdom did so badly during the initial waves of the covid-19 pandemic? This is a question that has puzzled many people, but not, apparently, […]
Abraar Karan: We must stop blaming—and start protecting—unvaccinated people
We need to stop viewing “the unvaccinated” as a homogenous group, writes Abraar Karan, and instead understand them as individual people […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Artificial translation
Last week I wrote about “tortured phrases”, a term invented by the authors of an arXiv preprint in which they highlight the ways in which fake scientific papers are being […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Tortured phrases
Artificial intelligence is hardly out of the news these days. Last week, for example, the AI company DeepMind, whose AI versions of board games such as chess and go have […]
Fear, gratitude, and family—all in a night’s work for my hospital
A few months ago, I came home late from working at the “covid-coalface,” and fell into a fitful, grumpy, sleep. I was sick to the back teeth with work, specifically […]