This newsletter has been on hiatus for the past few months while I was busy with boring but critically important activities (such as making a living, developing a business plan for 2020, and writing out an SOP for things like introducing myself to exhibitors at trade shows).

Enough time has passed since I last posted that I think a re-introduction is in order.

My name is Nate, and I build and fix websites for authors. I can also teach you how to use your website (or your mailing list). When I am not writing or working on websites, I build things like Author Website in a Box, my free all-in-one solution to setting up a new author website.

I love sharing useful info, which is one of the reasons why I launched Nova Writing Events site last month. This website is a calendar of author events in my area, and covers everything from conferences to book fairs and cons.

Finding and sharing useful info is my passion, and that is what I will do with future installments of this newsletter.

For today, however, I will indulge in my second passion: Sharing useless info. Here are five weird language facts that most people don't know. 

Enjoy!

1. The last character in the alphabet used to be "and". Reciting the alphabet used to end with "and, per se, and".  This was later corrupted into the term "ampersand" and the logogram we know today.
2. The facing pages of an open book have names: verso and recto. In English and other languages read left-to-right, Recto is on the right, but the opposite is true in languages read right-to-left.
3. The words "male" and "female" do not share a root, and in fact derive from two different words in Old French.
4. The "y" in names like "Ye Olde Soda Shoppe" is actually supposed to represent a "th" sound. The "y" character is used as a substitute for the old English character thorn,  þ.
5. English has this quirk where consonants sometimes jump from an indefinite article to a noun. It's called misdivision. One example of this is nickname, which derives from (an) eke name. The character "n" jumped from the article to the noun as the word.

See you next time!