Hamstrings and Hamstringing
A frequent injury among athletes is that of the hamstring: Dixon suffers hamstring injury Stewart suffers Hamstring injury Brandon Johnson suffers hamstring injury According to the orthopedics article at About.com, The hamstring muscle is a group of large, powerful muscles that span the back of the thigh, from the lower pelvis to the back of the shin bone. The hamstring is the important muscle that functions to extend the hip joint and flex the knee joint. In horses and other large four-footed animals,

Word of the Day: Secular
Secular is an adjective used to describe things or people that are not religious. When Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq, spoke out a week ago, calling for full national elections instead of the caucus-style balloting envisioned in the American plan for self-rule, most secular politicians concluded that he hoped the voters would elect a theocracy. (NY Times) Residents of Jerusalem chose a secular businessman to lead one of the world’s most revered and complicated cities, putting an end to five years of ultra-Orthodox Jewish control, election results showed Wednesday. (USA Today)

Royal Order of Adverbs
Recently, I wrote about the Royal Order of Adjectives. Not surprisingly, there’s also a Royal Order of Adverbs. When you write a sentence that has more than one adverb, there is a loose order in which you should arrange them: Manner Place Frequency Time Purpose In a sentence with five (yikes!) such adverbs, it would go like this: Harrison runs dutifully (manner) around the track (place) every morning (frequency) before breakfast (time) to prepare for the marathon (purpose). Adverbs, however, have much more flexibility than adjectives,

Cutting the Mustard
I read an online comment in which the writer said that something wouldn’t “cut the muster.” I cruised the web a bit to see if this is a common alteration of the idiom to cut the mustard. It doesn’t seem to be too wide spread, but it’s out there. Apparently there’s a mix-up with the expression to pass muster, meaning “to meet a required standard.” Ex. You call that project “finished”? It doesn’t pass muster with me! muster: Chiefly Mil. An act of calling together soldiers, sailors, prisoners, etc.; an assembling of people for inspection, exercises, etc. We can say: T

Word of the Day: Peripatetic
Peripatetic, the noun, is a person who walks or travels about. It can be used as an adjective as well, with the same meaning. The word makes allusion to Aristotle, who used to teach his philosophy while walking in the Lyceum. The youngest son, by 13 years, of rentier parents, Wilson was born at Bexhill-on-Sea on the south coast of England. His early years were peripatetic and insecure, mostly spent in private hotels and boardinghouses, a couple of steps ahead of the bailiffs. (NY Times) But rather too confining for its peripatetic creator, David de Rothschild, the 31-year-old eco-celebrity (and scion of Europe’s fabled banking fam