Articles from 2009

Recently, my friend Diane started feeling nauseous and passing out. After a scary trip to the emergency room, she learned the problem was her heart: it kept stopping every once in a while, so she was strongly advised to get a pacemaker. (She now has one and is doing great, thank Zeus.)

But when Diane was debating what to do, a doctor not only came down in favor of pacemaker insertion, but a certain word choice as well:

How the word "wombat" entered the English language turns out to be a surprisingly complex story. Australian linguist David Nash tells the tale here.

Last night an unusual event happened at the White House. Chief Justice John Roberts re-administered the presidential oath of office to Barack Obama, a day and a half after they had performed the same ritual rather shakily in the inaugural ceremony. White House counsel Gregory B. Craig explained: "We believe that the oath of office was administered effectively and that the president was sworn in appropriately yesterday. But the oath appears in the Constitution itself, and out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath a second time."