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Ah, yes, abstemious. I forgot what it means, but as soon as I saw it on A.Word.A.Day, it reminded me of that stupid SAT prep class my dad made me take.

Anyway, it’s an adjective that means “sparing or moderate in eating and drinking” or “characterized by abstinence”. It’s easy to spell, because it has all five vowels in order.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says that it comes from Latin “abstemius ’sober, temperate,’ from ab(s)- ‘from’ + stem of temetum ’strong drink’”.

• Weekly Word: Gesticulate - Why is the phrase “gesticulate wildly” more common than “gesture wildly”?
• Spanish False Friends - Confusing Spanish words
• First PHP/MySQL Project Day 9: Inserting Data into MySQL - Some good progress today!
  
• Redesigning My Site Day 26: The Sidebars - Hardly any progress, which is really starting to annoy me. I need to set a deadline… maybe May 1st.
  

False friends are words that seem like they should have the same meaning when they really don’t. For example, you might think that embarazada means embarrassed, but it actually means pregnant.

The Tomísimo Blog recently started a series on these Tricky Words, which sparked my interest. I then found a couple long lists from About.com:

• False Friends - Obvious… But Wrong
• Fickle Friends - Almost, But Not Quite

These words are so difficult to memorize! Does anyone know why they sound so similar to English? Is it a coincidence? A conspiracy?

This six-minute video shows how I created a table and then inserted data from an HTML form into MySQL.

Click To Play

Links for Inserting Data Into MySQL:

Reference pages from the MySQL manual on creating a table:

• Creating a Table
• Chapter 11: Data Types
• The Char and Varchar Types

Previous videos on PHP with HTML forms:

• Using PHP with HTML Forms
• Security Issues with Superglobals and register_globals
• Functions for Form Input Security - This also includes info about magic quotes.

Inserting data into MySQL:

• mysql_real_escape_string - Lots of info about this function from the PHP manual.
• PHP MySQL Insert Into - Info on the INSERT INTO statement from the W3Schools site.

I did some research on MySQL security issues, and man, did that give me a headache! I’ll have to get back to that one day — but hopefully not for a very long time.

To gesticulate means “to make or use gestures, esp. in an animated or excited manner with or instead of speech.”

From the Online Etymology Dictionary, it comes from Latin “gesticulari ‘to gesture, mimic,’ from gesticulus ‘a mimicking gesture,’ dim. of gestus ‘gesture, carriage, posture’.”

A quick search for “gesticulate” on Google News revealed that six out of the 17 results use the phrase “gesticulate wildly”. This made me curious, so I searched on Google:

• “gesture” - about 15,900,000 results
• “gesticulate” - about 159,000 results
• “gesture wildly” - about 676 results
• “gesticulate wildly” - about 984 results

Interesting, isn’t it? Even though gesture is used 100 times more often than gesticulate, the phrase “gesticulate wildly” is still more common than “gesture wildly”. Well, if you’re going to describe an action as happening “wildly”, I guess it works better with a word that also sounds wild.

The definition for gesture is simply “to make or use a gesture or gestures”, but the definition for gesticulate means to make gestures “in an animated or excited manner”. Wouldn’t that make “gesticulate wildly” a bit of a pleonasm (a redundant phrase)? Or is it an idiom that has some extra meaning?