In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, I take a look at how the car brand Cadillac remains an emblem of luxury, even though Cadillac itself is no longer really "the Cadillac of cars." In the health care debate on Capitol Hill, we frequently hear high-cost health insurance plans described as "Cadillac plans." And there's another area of American culture where Cadillac continues to have outsized linguistic importance: baseball.
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Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, takes us on a tour of some of the quirky jargon that has sprung up at the software giant.
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Teachers at Work
A column about teaching
Mourning and Celebrating: Lessons Learned at Stella Maris 
November 4, 2009
By Shannon Reed
Shannon Reed shares practical lessons she learned teaching at Stella Maris High School, a Catholic girls' school in Queens.
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As its Word of the Year for 2009, Webster's New World Dictionary picked distracted driving, an example of the literary device known as hypallage.
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Automatically create lists of vocabulary from any text
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National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is just around the corner. As the website explains, "Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved." Visit the NaNoWriMo website to learn more.
Article Topics:
The Magic of Three: Teaching Students about "Triplets"
October 28, 2009
- 12 Comments
Beware the Colophon! The Return of the Literary Spelling Bee
October 27, 2009
- 5 Comments
Voice: The Least of Your Worries
October 26, 2009
- 8 Comments
More Ms.-teries of "Ms."
October 23, 2009
- 4 Comments
No Soap (Radio): An Advertiser's Little White "Lye"
October 20, 2009
- 3 Comments
Nicholas Rushlow's Favorite Words (and a Killer Spelling Bee)
October 16, 2009
- 1 Comment
The Pride of Pickerington: Nicholas Rushlow, Spelling Whiz
October 15, 2009
- 3 Comments
The Biggest Misnomer of All Time?
October 12, 2009
- 10 Comments
At the End of the Day, What's, You Know, Annoying? Whatever!
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October 9, 2009
- 36 Comments
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The Magic of Three: Teaching Students about "Triplets"
James T M.
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"Forget not the significant notes of the musical scale: first, third, fifth, and seventh. The second and fourth sort of hang around most of the time."
- Today, 11:20 AM
Ellis D.
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"This is, of course, very true but do not forget the two other magical odd numbers:
FIVE- brings good luck and wards away evil, is very popular in..."
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Throwdown Catchup
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It's Cadillac Time!
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"Wow. The use of "Cadillac" for "top of the line" came up at lunch yesterday! A customer representative was relating the comments of a customer earlier..."
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Ray Adams
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"Down here in Australia, of course, absolutely nobody buys or drives Cadillacs. Our emblem of quality comes from the Brits: "It's the Rolls-Royce..."
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Microspeaking
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Mind Your Pints and Quarts: Making Sense of Liquid Measurement
October 2, 2009
How can students use the Visual Thesaurus to learn the U.S. customary system of measuring liquids and to apply their knowledge in solving math problems?
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Mapping Your Identity: A Back-to-School Ice Breaker
August 28, 2009
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The Continents and Oceans of the World
July 30, 2009
- 3 Comments
VocabGrabbing the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution
June 30, 2009
For the October edition of the Visual Thesaurus crossword puzzle, we've got a spooky Halloween theme. Figure out the hidden word chain and you could win a Visual Thesaurus T-shirt!
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For the past few years, the Visual Thesaurus has been a proud partner of The New York Times Learning Network, helping students boost their reading, writing and communications skills. We've been working together to develop innovative lesson plans that integrate the Visual Thesaurus with engaging articles from the pages of The New York Times. Now, as the Learning Network gets a new look, re-launched as a Times blog, we're working even more closely to provide new resources for teaching and learning.
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Introducing... Community Spelling Bees
September 23, 2009
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Grab Hold of Your Vocabulary with VocabGrabber!
May 5, 2009
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Word Lists: Sharing the Lexical Love
March 24, 2009
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