Sputnik, Lego, and Viet Cong.

ahistorical, adj. One would think this adjective would have a longer history, but evidently not.

This one is easily antedated; the earliest cite I’ve found is Psychology And The Social Order: An Introduction to the Dynamic Study of Social Fields by J. F. Brown (McGraw-Hill, 1936), p. 199 (one of numerous uses): “So far our analyses of group behavior have been ahistorical rather than historical in their methodology.”

preboarding, n.2 and adj. People often make fun of this bit of airline jargon, arguing that the pre- suffix is unnecessary and misleading—the families with small children are actual boarding the aircraft, not doing something before they board.

“Actual” should be “actually.”

For the events of May, instead of “Walter O’Malley moves the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles” I would suggest something like “Walter O’Malley announces the move of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles at the end of the season”.

I’m suffering a slight case of reverse diegogarcity - encountering a word in the wild and then having it come up here.

I puzzled over a clue in a recent Guardian crossword: “Twisting of a choir’s tail that didn’t really happen.” I eventually came up with ahistorical as an anagram of ‘a choir’s tail’. It was fairly obvious what ahistorical should mean, but at that point I wasn’t conscious of ever having encountered the word before. And suddenly, here it is!

I’m loving this series.

As a side note: seems to me that in North America it is common to refer to what I would call “a lego piece” as “a lego”.

Yeah, “Ow! I stepped on a Lego!” sounds right.  Also, when building with my sister and we wanted to name a specific size piece we would call for a “fourser”, a “sixer”, “flat eightser”, etc.  Not sure if Lego Corp has official names for the sizes but cooperative play required our own working vocabulary.

I’m loving this series.

Aren’t we all?

headage

Many years ago I lived in a kibbutz, and among other things, I found myself taking over and managing a small apiary (the previous manager had developed an allergy to bee stings, and was in a desperate hurry to hand over - I got three and a half hours’ training). In my first progress report to the kibbutz general meeting, I was able to state that the branch possessed an estimated 400,000 head. The following year, I calculated (there were difficulties with actual head counting ;-) that we had passed the million mark.

There’s headage for you! Move over, King Ranch!

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