43 44 45 46 47 Displaying 309-315 of 493 Articles

How to Describe Gibberish

Eyewash! Piffle! Twaddle! Mumbo jumbo! Want to know twenty ways to describe nonsensical speech? Maeve Maddox of Daily Writing Tips has the answers here.

Dictionaries in the Age of Google

Do we still need dictionaries in the age of Google? That's the question posed by Julia Angwin in the Wall Street Journal's "Decoder" blog. Read her investigation here.

How Did People Sound in 1963?

The anachronistic dictionary that showed up recently on "Mad Men" was just the tip of the iceberg. Linguist John McWhorter argues that the supposedly authentic TV drama doesn't really capture how Americans spoke in the early '60s. Read all about it on his New Republic blog.

Age of the Aughts

"Double zeroes"? "Goose eggs"? "Diddly-squats"? Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters considers the tricky question of what we should call the current decade in his latest column for Good Magazine.

"Punctuation Hero" or Vandal?

In the United Kingdom, the apostrophe is rapidly disappearing from street signs. But one man has decided to take matters into his own hands.  Continue reading...

Word Routes on Bloggingheads

If you enjoy reading Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer's Word Routes column, you'll want to check out his appearance on Bloggingheads. Ben discusses many past Word Routes topics, from Ms. to jazz to Cronkiters, with his brother, science writer Carl Zimmer.

Conflations

Fascinated by amalgamations like "green behind the ears"? How about "a wrench in the ointment" or "frothing at the bit"? Check out more of these idiom blends at Conflations: "Idiom conflation is a poetic art with a purpose."

43 44 45 46 47 Displaying 309-315 of 493 Articles

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