Search the Site

Your Search:
109 110 111 112 113 Displaying 1101-1110 of 3460 Results

  1. Word Count

     The Sound of Writing
    Wed Feb 11 00:00:00 EST 2015
    The dog ate the food. That's writing at its plainest. Each word has a definite, well-known meaning, the signifiers point to their signifieds just like they're supposed to. If we know how to read, we have no trouble seeing Fido happily munching his kibble.

  2. Candlepower

     Red Pen Diaries: Das Kapitalization
    Mon Nov 08 00:00:00 EST 2010

    There it was again — a random capital. The offender was the "M" at the beginning of "Mother," as in "Her Mother was the first to notice she could really sing."

    If it had been "Mother told me she thought I could really sing," it would have been fine and dandy because "Mother" would have been serving as a proper noun there, referring to a particular maternal figure. But when it's not standing in for a name, "mother" should not be capitalized.

  3. Word Routes

     Happy Web Day!
    Thu Nov 12 00:00:00 EST 2009
    November 12th isn't a public holiday, but perhaps it should be. On this day in 1990, a memorandum was produced by the English physicist Tim Berners-Lee and the Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau while working for CERN in Geneva. Entitled "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project," it might not have seemed so earth-shattering at the time. But it set into motion the Age of the Web: it's hard to overestimate the impact this document has had on our chronically wired culture — and on our language.

  4. Lesson Plans

     The Visual Thesaurus and the SAT
    Mon Jul 16 00:00:00 EDT 2007
    This lesson introduces students to sentence completion questions and then better prepares them for this section of the SAT by having them use the Visual Thesaurus to formulate original sentence completion questions to stump their classmates.

  5. Word Routes

     A Big "Guerdon" for Spelling Bee Champ
    Tue Jun 03 00:00:00 EDT 2008
    A hearty congratulations from all of us here at the Visual Thesaurus to Sameer Mishra, winner of the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee! Sameer, a 13-year-old from West Lafayette, Indiana, triumphed over his competitors by correctly spelling a very fitting word in the final round: guerdon, meaning "reward or payment." His reward was $35,000 in cash and various other prizes. The second-place finisher, Sidharth Chand of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, performed admirably on words like introuvable ("impossible to find"), but he eventually erred in spelling prosopopoeia, a personifying figure of speech.

  6. Lesson Plans

     Shades of Meaning
    Mon Nov 19 00:00:00 EST 2007
    In this lesson, small groups of students will compete in a "shades of meaning" contest to see which group can use the VT to help them match words with similar definitions but different connotations in the shortest amount of time.

  7. Word Count

     A Dipper's Scrapbook
    Wed Jun 17 00:00:00 EDT 2015
    Like most writers, I'm an omnivorous reader. Friends ask me, "What are you reading now?" and I have a hard time answering because when I stop to think, I realize I'm reading a dozen books at once, dipping into this one, skimming through that one.

  8. Word Routes

     2008: The Year of "Oversharing"
    Tue Dec 02 00:00:00 EST 2008
    Another week, another Word of the Year selection! The latest comes from the editors at Webster's New World Dictionary, who have selected the useful verb overshare. They define it as: "to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval." It's certainly a word that captures the zeitgeist of the Age of Too Much Information.

  9. Candlepower

     Understanding "Maven"
    Thu May 19 00:00:00 EDT 2022
    How a Yiddish word with Hebrew roots became a ubiquitous American brand name, backronym, and even a baby name.

  10. Word Count

     Banning Words for the New Year
    Mon Jan 20 00:00:00 EST 2014
    In the spirit of New Year's resolutions like quit smoking, lose weight, exercise more, each January brings new calls to ban words, the linguistic equivalent of losing weight. But while New Year's resolutions are self-imposed — I decide that an hour on the elliptical watching Sherlock would be better than an hour on the couch with Sherlock and a bowl of chips — word bans tend to be imposed by someone else.
109 110 111 112 113 Displaying 1101-1110 of 3460 Results