[This post was originally posted on the original Corybanter blog- on Tumblr on May 21, 2020. I was just rereading it, and I thought it was pretty good, so I’m reposting it here. Enjoy!] The podcast episode I released today was entitled “In Praise of Roget’s.” In it, I. talk…

I first started blogging back in December 2007 at a site that I rarely visit anymore called LiveJournal.com. But it wasn’t until February 2009 that I got the idea for Corybanter, which I first created at Tumblr. The original Corybanter site is still HERE. There have been various iterations of Corybanter through the years: the original Tumblr blog, Corybanter II (at the long-gone Posterous), and the Weebly version that you can still visit from the link on this blog’s homepage.

All right, I’m just going to put this out there, and we’ll have to see if anything comes of it. I still blog from time to time on my Corybanter blog, right here on Medium. …

If I may return to the subject of dictionaries for a moment, it’s always a fun time of the year here in December, when one sees various people and organizations looking back at the year that’s almost come to an end, and summing everything up. …

Since Spotify for Podcasters was so kind as to provide me with a Wrapped presentation, giving me the stats for my Corybanter podcast in 2023, I figured, just for fun, I would record a brief episode. There’s not much to it, mainly just a description of what I’ve been doing with my blogs lately. Also, I forgot that I had renamed The Corybantic Podcast to, simply, Corybanter. So throughout the 6 minute episode, I consistently refer to it by its old title.

I’ll admit it: I used to be one of those “grammar snobs,” who was fond of correcting people online about misusing pronoun cases (“between you and I”) or telling them “irregardless” isn’t a word. I prided myself on knowing the rules. Most of all, I was the type of person…

I don’t even remember how it happened, but just a few days ago, I decided it was time to dig back into Prince’s catalog on YouTube Music. Funny thing about my now three-decade history of being a fan of Prince’s music: I remember that when I was in high school…

I was considering some of the excellent speeches that show up in Shakespeare’s works that aren’t the big ones (like “To be or not to be” or the “Queen Mab speech”). It occurred to me that Juliet in Romeo & Juliet has some excellent stuff that is often cut in…

Most English speakers are at least passingly familiar with Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. But not everyone has seen or heard the version of the monologue from the First Quarto edition of Hamlet. It’s quite different! HAMLET To be, or not to be, ay, there’s the…