|
|
"Here's one safe prediction for the Winter Olympics," writes Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer in the New York Times Magazine. "Competitors and commentators will use podium as a verb, as in, 'She can definitely podium here today.' And just as predictably, some observers will shudder at the word." Read the rest here.
Poetry can be found in unexpected places. On 3 Quarks Daily, Richard Eskow takes transcriptions of his phone messages, as automatically processed by Google Voice, and turns them into hilarious gems of free verse. Check it out here.
On OUPblog, the official blog of Oxford University Press, sociolinguist Alexandra D'Arcy has kicked off a new column by penning an ode to her grandmother, "a firm advocate of correctness" who "in the proud tradition of language purists... found anything other than 'the standard' objectionable."
Continue reading...
Franklin P. Adams, a regular at the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s and '30s, was a master of comic verse. His best-known work is no doubt "Baseball's Sad Lexicon," an ode to the Chicago Cubs double-play combination of "Tinker to Evers to Chance." The blog Futility Closet brings to our attention another playful ode by Adams that's right up our alley: "To a Thesaurus."
Continue reading...
Combine sweet tooth with tooth fairy and you get sweet tooth fairy. That's the premise for The Illustrated Sweet Tooth Fairy, a website that seeks to collect such whimsical fusions as magnetic personality disorder, periodic table manners, and emotional baggage carousel. Erin McKean describes the project in the Boston Globe here.
Have you heard that "the average teenager uses just 800 words in daily communication"? Despite being widely reported in the media, this factoid simply isn't true. Linguist David Crystal debunks the myth here.
|
Other Departments:
|
