Shannon Reed, a regular contributor to our Teachers at Work column, teaches at the Brooklyn Theatre Arts High School, where she has discovered that adapting the Euripides play Iphigenia has lit an unexpected spark for her students.  Continue reading...

In his latest monthly roundup of under-the-radar euphemisms, Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters gets all pop-cultural, finding inspiration from the likes of 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy.  Continue reading...

I've got a problem with solutions. Well, it's not solutions, per se, but the word "solutions." Actually, it's not even the word "solutions"; it's the notion that all you have to do is throw that word onto your home page and the world will beat a path to your door.  Continue reading...

"Survival of the Fittest" is just one example of the many slam-dunk vocabulary activities that Janet Allen offers to teachers of all content areas in Inside Words: Tools for Teaching Academic Vocabulary. Check out how this activity could play out in the science classroom in our lesson plan, "Vocabulary Bursting With Energy."  Continue reading...

A couple of weeks ago, Merriam-Webster announced their top words of 2009 based on the intensity of lookups to its online dictionary and thesaurus. Now Dictionary.com has their own announcement of the most looked-up words of the past year. Though the main list is full of usual suspects like affect and effect (perennial stumpers even for native English speakers), the "top gainer" is a very unusual word: esurient, meaning 'extremely hungry; desirous; greedy.' What might explain the ravenous interest in this obscure term?  Continue reading...

The National Museum of Language near Washington, D.C. is putting together an exhibit on the role of the War of 1812 in the development of American English, as we approach that war's bicentennial (or bicentenary, as they still say on the other side). In the Lounge we've been exploring ideas with the museum, and this month we wanted to share some of our findings.  Continue reading...

Have you ever wondered why we say "hello" when we answer the telephone? Nate Barksdale of the think tank Cardus takes a long look at the history of the greeting here.