by Kevin Burton Pet rocks I remember. Mood rings, yep. Little sawed-off Gremlin cars. Yeah, I remember those. I was part of the 70s. I was on the scene baby! I watched the Jackson 5 cartoon. Didn’t dance much but I sang a lot of disco. I remember the bicentennial and staying up …
Tag Archives: Watergate
More Words (And A Suffix) From Yiddish
by Kevin Burton Along with more words English has gotten from Yiddish, today we include one suffix. A suffix is a letter of group of letters added to the end of a word. It can change the word’s grammatical function or meaning. The best example of a suffix from my formative years …
Words From The Wrong Side Of The Law
by Kevin Burton Some of the entries on today’s word list from Merriam-Webster I learned as a wee lad, by following the news about the federal government. If it hadn’t been for the Nixon Administration and the Watergate scandal, I would have thought hush money was money a parent spends to keep the …
Our Democracy Could Use Another Truman
by Kevin Burton Not sure what I expected in advance from the Harry S. Truman Museum in Independence, Missouri, but I ended up in tears. Truman was the Vice President thrust into the presidency just 82 days into his term, following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945. By then the tide …
News At My (And On My) Fingertips
by Kevin Burton On the next-to-last night of our Upper Midwest vacation we found ourselves watching the clothes go round. We were in Norfolk, Nebraska, boyhood hometown of Johnny Carson, when we gathered our quarters and the Tide Pods Jeannette had bought for the occasion, and took advantage of the Hampton Inn’s coin …
Lifelong Learning, Exercise For The Mind
by Kevin Burton Had some fun last week speculating about new hobbies that could take the place of fantasy football, should that pastime drive me too crazy. I was picking from a list of 50 hobbies for seniors on the website 55places.com. A few of the hobbies, such as axe throwing, were laughable …
Speaking Of English, Speaking In British
by Kevin Burton Not smashing, not daft, something mid-table I’d say, to use a football analogy. I thought I was ready, so I had a go, with middling results. Every day Merriam-Webster sends me an e-mail to help me watch my language. A few weeks ago they announced “The Great British Vocabulary …
Did Gilbert O’Sullivan Launch Disco Era?
by Kevin Burton There have been many theories to explain the rise and fall of disco music. Here’s a new one for its rise: Disco music exploded in the mid-70s as a direct result of “Alone Again Naturally” by Irish singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan. OK, so I can’t prove I’m right, but you …
“The Immigrant” Didn’t Fit John Lennon
by Kevin Burton For about three minutes and fifty seconds a tidy story unfolds from the pen of lyricist Phil Cody and the voice of the great Neil Sedaka. Attempt to read between the lines though and you have a mess on your hands, especially with Sedaka dedicating the song to ex-Beatle John …
The Sounds They Were A-Changin’
by Kevin Burton Musical eras, like chocolate bars or ice cubes, are fluid before they are solid, shaped by the temperature of the times. We can’t always distinguish them day to day. Historians declare them later, according to their differing standards. But for me there is something momentous about looking at the …
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