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Peter D. Kramer

@peterdkramer.bsky.social
1.2K followers 676 following 380 posts

Author, most recently, of Death of the Great Man, a novel. Also new: 30th anniversary edition of Listening to Prozac. peterdkramer.com

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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Beating a dead horse, I know, but here's a pretty comparable (disallowed) word, DINGILY vs the pangram FOAMILY. DINGILY does closely resemble recognized words, including ones accepted today.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Here's a ngram contrasting the missing pangram FELICITATE with Thursday' FOAMILY. Felicitate looks to be (almost) infinitely more common—and if you go back in time, the difference is yet greater. Felicitate also does well compared to the least common of today's pangrams.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
x.com/PeterDKramer...
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Not sure how precise that link is, but here's my tweet from June 2021...
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Ambiguous hed in @wsj.com? If you judge your hotel roommate to be revolting, you'd better hope that your suite's bathroom has a door. www.wsj.com/lifestyle/tr...
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
Oh, too bad... How quirky X has become.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 14/09/2025
While I'm at it: If MICROCRACK was low frequency, how about ANABIOTIC?
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 20/07/2025
Glory days. Here's the cover, with an image taken from the office television. I was a college intern, but I had three pieces in the issue & got written up in the house organ, N/W. In the photo, I was more or less in uniform, wearing a seersucker suit with a thin bow tie.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
Not sure why the whole Web isn't saying this. Trump's Brazil tariff is illegal. Presidents can impose tariffs only for limited economic reasons. Interfering with a prosecution abroad is not a permitted rationale. The issue is both legislative & constitutional. Only Congress can levy taxes.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 04/07/2025
SSA BS. Is this politicization a first? Just got an email from the Social Security Administration patting the President on the back for the budget-busting bill Irony (one of many) is that the bill changes the taxation of benefits in a way that threatens to deplete the fund a year early.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
If ADENINE, why not ALANINE? Thinking it might be because alanine is "non-essential."
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
was in, is out CARIOCA. Surprising. It's been in forever. Below, an ngram of carioca vs the also-perennial YENNING, whose inclusion had never made sense to me.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
"BREAKING: RFK JR CONFIRMED AS HHS SECRETARY" Quick hed that says it all about our times. Farce as news, news as deadly threat.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
From the rival site:
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Always: DITALINI
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
NYTimes hed watch. Asked how vigorous he might be at 86, Biden said, “I don’t know. Who the hell knows?” I find the response to be a step shy of acknowledgment that he might not have been able to serve out his term. I mean, who among us knows how vigorous he or she will be in four years?
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
For my sins, watchng snippets of the Patriots-Cardinals game. Hapless is the word for the Pats. Hapless in both senses of the word, unlucky and clumsy.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
Then again, @OED does not recognize cart-way as an unhyphenated word. The OED dates cart-way to the 1390s, and various spellings appear in the literary examples. @merriam-webster.com does contain cartway.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
Here's the n-gram. AMNION appears in print much more often that CARTWAY and has done so for two centuries. But then, amnion s medical and cartway is common language, or was once.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
That less frequently used word is DOGTROT.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Tweak FRL to "felons, relatives, & loonies"?
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
So misleading—as if there never had been a bio-psychosocial model. I have not read the book, but *no* plausible representation of depression in the brain will be incompatible the life-circumstance perspective. No biological theory ever proposed has been.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
From my college classmate Mike Kazin, the opposite bet:
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
The missing compound word having to do with paper or rope: HANDLAID. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/h...
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Of course, nothing is as unused as MEMED, which goes unremarked. Use 'memed' in a sentence. @lauralippman.bsky.social @around.com @fetterman.senate.gov @notinwordlist.bsky.social
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Having (privately) received complaints about the recent pangram MICROCRACK, I ran an Ngram (vs low-frequency 🐝 words) in the years since the OED says the word came into use. It's on the level of ARCO & CANOPIC, well below the now-discarded TAIN. @merriam-webster.com classes microcrack as medical.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
3/ Apparently, the warning made adolescents less likely to seek care & pediatricians less likely to prescribe. The one variable that did not change: Doctors became no more likely to monitor teens for suicidality. Here, the turquoise line shows the prescribing drop-off.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
2/ Here's the relevant graph. It's stunning. You almost never see a public health intervention that causes this kind of inflection point, a dramatic worsening of public health. The red line shows a steady decrease in teen suicides followed, after the warning, with a steady increase.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Regarding Trump's absurd cabinet appointments, I've taken a look at this sentence from Hannah Arendt which has been making its way around the Web.
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
As Bsky balloons, Is X feeling pressure?
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 03/12/2023
@debamlen.bsky.social I got queen bee twice yesterday, first with 242 points & then with 249. The added word (absent from @merriamwebster.bsky.social) was HAMACHI. Am I right that the goal posts moved midday? Has this happened before? #thegridkid #hivemind #nytspellingbee
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Peter D. Kramer @peterdkramer.bsky.social · 20/10/2023
Is "rank-and-file" the new euphemism for the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus? @nytimes.com
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