Tuesday night's State of the Union address by President Obama provided a fresh round of political phrase-making. As members of Congress went on a bipartisan date night, Obama called for investments to win the future and meet our Sputnik moment by doing big things. Here's a look at some of the memorable words and phrases that came out of the speech.  Continue reading...

When Tillie Harris goes into premature labor, she has no one to turn to but her estranged father. Their relationship has been strained since Tillie was eight years old and her mother mysteriously vanished. Up From the Blue follows young Tillie's startling discoveries about what happened to her mother, as well as grown Tillie's struggle with a relationship that’s stuck in the past.  Continue reading...

Last week, we published the first part of our interview with Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson about their new book, Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools. We also presented an excerpt describing a student's approach to learning vocabulary through rap. Now we hear more from Anne and Christine about their experiences working with teachers and students on issues of linguistic diversity.  Continue reading...

The College Board abandoned the analogy as a SAT vocabulary question type in 2005. Those of us who remember taking SAT-style analogies are either nostalgic for the short word puzzles or are still traumatized by the sight of those tricky pairs of words mysteriously situated between single and double colons.  Continue reading...

In this week's worksheet, students can use the relationship lines in the Visual Thesaurus word map displays to answer analogy questions.  Continue reading...

AT&T wants you to believe that corporations are people, just like you and me, and that just like us, they have a constitutional right to privacy. To prove it, AT&T says, just look at the law and the dictionary.  Continue reading...