justed listed

I received this postcard the other day in the mail, from a local Realtor looking to drum up business from people like me who own condos in the same development:

JUSTED LISTED
116 Waterside, Building B, Unit 206
Two bedroom, two baths and two outdoor living spaces on the pond!!!
$329,900

I have to admit that, as absurd as "justed listed" sounds, it wasn't until the third or fourth time I looked at it that the headline looked wrong. A Google search confirms that "justed" for "just" is rare but not unheard of in phrases like "justed listed" (390 hits), "justed married" (522) and "justed sold" (56).

It's not hard to explain why: when we write such a phrase, our brains are thinking "past participle tense!" (whether or not we know that it's called that). We might be so anxious to mark the phrase as being in that tense that we accidentally inflect the wrong word and tag the -ed onto the adverb just in addition to the verb list.

N.B. — I suspect that some of these Google hits are from items written by non-native English speakers, but the Realtor's postcard is not.

the eight kinds of drunks

I recently read Ammon Shea's Reading the OED, his chronicle of the year he spent reading the Oxford English Dictionary from cover to cover (well, covers to covers). Shea finds a lot of great words along the way, but my favorite was his entry for goat-drunk. It turns out that this word is just one of eight terms that an Elizabethan writer named Thomas Nashe came up with hundreds of years ago to describe the different ways people act when inebriated. Shea lists them all, even though they didn't all make it into the OED. How many of these people do YOU know?

1. Ape drunke: “he leapes, and sings, and hollowes, and daunceth for the heavens”
   
   
2. Lion drunke: “he flings the pots abut the house, calls his Hostesse whore, breakes the glasse windows with his dagger, and is apt to quarrell with any man that speaks to him”
   
   
3. Swine drunke – "heauy lumpish, and sleepie, and cries for a little more drinke"
   
   
4. Sheepe drunke – "wise in his owne conceipt, when he cannot bring forth a right word"
   
   
5. Mawdlen drunke – "when a fellowe will weepe for kindnes in the midst of his Ale, and kisse you, saying; By God Captaine I loue thee, goe thy waies thou dost not thinke so often of me as I do of thee, I would (if it pleased GOD) I could not loue thee so well as I doo, and then he puts his finger in his eie, and cries"
   
   
6. Martin drunke – "when a man is drunke and drinkes himselfe sober ere he stirre"
   
   
7. Goat drunke: "made lascivious by alcohol"
   
   
8. Foxe drunke: "when he is craftie drunke, as many of the Dutch men
   bee, and neuer bargain but when they are drunke"
   

biracial, cilantro, picaroon

What do these three words have in common? No, they're not subject-lines from spam e-mails, although they sound like it. All three of these fantastic words were contained in a single game of WEBoggle, my favorite online word game. If you follow the link, prepare to waste hours...