This month marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Miranda v. Arizona. The decision, handed down on June 13, 1966, ushered vocabulary into American English that is in nearly everyone's lexicon today, including Miranda Rights, Miranda Warnings, and even the verb mirandize, which means "recite the Miranda warnings (to a person under arrest)". Nearly 10 years after Miranda, philosopher of language Paul Grice began to develop his theory of conversational implicature and the Gricean Maxims that are part and parcel of it.  Continue reading...

Speakers are prone to misinterpret an expression for various reasons and then incorporate the incorrect usage into their lexicons. When such misusages become widespread, the question that arises is whether the new and nominally incorrect version of an expression should be regarded as acceptable.  Continue reading...

One of the ways in which massive corpora (databases of natural language examples) have revolutionized lexicography is by providing access to a level of statistical analysis of language that was never before possible. The data in a corpus can tell us, with the effort of a few keystrokes—and backed by the effort of hundreds of person-hours of software development—all we need to know about the most frequent uses and collocations of words.  Continue reading...

Even if you don't have an online news alert set up for the word dictionary, you may have caught wind of the recent tempest involving the exemplification of the adjective rabid with the phrase "rabid feminist" in some Oxford dictionaries, especially a dictionary that is used on smartphones.  Continue reading...

A time-honored ritual around the world at year's end is to nominate Words of the Year, originally inspired by TIME magazine's Person of the Year. But words can be much more different from each other than people are. People of the Year are normally distinguished by their great influence. Words of the Year bear myriad relationships to the things they represent and because of this, the ways in which they distinguish themselves are extremely divergent.  Continue reading...

The breathless anticipation is now at an end and the festivities can commence: it is 2016, the International Year of Pulses. If your main dialect of English is a North American one, you may begin by wondering whose pulses are included, since you probably think of pulse as designating the rhythmic contraction and expansion of the arteries with each beat of the heart. But there is the other pulse, familiar to speakers of other English dialects, that is more or less synonymous with legume.  Continue reading...

I heard an interview on the radio the other day with Dan Price, CEO of Seattle-based credit card processing firm Gravity Payments. He's been in the news because of his decision to set the minimum salary for his employees at $70,000. What interested me in the interview was his use of pencil out, a phrasal verb that was new to me. Lexicographers are to words like birders are to birds: when we spot one that's not on our life list we get very excited, even as others' eyes may glaze over.  Continue reading...