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  1. Word Count

     Getting Life into Writing
    Wed Aug 19 00:00:00 EDT 2015

    Life, Life, LIFE!

    Whether the words, spaces, and punctuation marks appear in The Iliad or Don Quixote, a fluffy sportswear catalogue or a dense computer manual, the goal of all writing is to get some tiny bit of the gargantuan energy we call life onto the page so that other humans can read it and say, "Yes, that writing describes the life I know."

  2. Backstory

     Stewart O'Nan, Author of "Songs for the Missing"
    Fri Jan 23 00:00:00 EST 2009
    The summer I was 17, I worked at a camp in Northeast Ohio, on the Lake Erie shore. I was courting the girl who would later become (and still is) my wife, and many nights we would be up late, watching the slow progress of the oreboats and gazing at the stars over the water. I was on maintenance, and, being the only one who could drive the tractor, I had to get up at five-thirty in the morning and coax the old red Farm-All to life and hook up the homemade, plywood-sided trailer so we could collect the camp's garbage and scrub the latrines. I didn't sleep a lot that summer, but late one night, or more exactly, early one morning while I was enjoying my two hours of rest, the state police knocked on the door of the male staff's dorm.

  3. Language Lounge

     Lexical Apostasy
    Tue Nov 01 00:00:00 EDT 2011
    Words step outside of their borders all the time; and once they are in new territory, they rarely follow the rules that bound them in their original context. As time passes, they can become complete strangers to their original users, and may even be seen as betraying them.

  4. Lesson Plans

     The Faces Behind the Adjectives
    Tue Sep 03 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    What does it mean to have an adjective created in your honor? What does that adjective imply?

  5. Backstory

     A. S. King, Author of "The Dust of 100 Dogs"
    Fri Apr 10 00:00:00 EDT 2009
    In the late 17th century, famed pirate Emer Morrisey was on the cusp of escaping pirate life with her one true love and unfathomable riches when she was slain and cursed with the dust of 100 dogs, dooming her to one hundred lives as a dog before returning to a human body — with her memories intact. Now she's a contemporary American teenager, and all she needs is a shovel and a ride to Jamaica.

  6. Candlepower

     The Lingo of Pluto: New Horizons, New Words
    Tue Jul 21 00:00:00 EDT 2015
    Pluto is coming into startingly sharp focus, thanks to the first images and data received from the space probe New Horizons last week. As we learn more about this distant cousin of Earth, we're also expanding our linguistic horizons. Here's a closer look at some of the words and names in the Plutonian news.

  7. Word Routes

     Mailbag Friday: "Pipe Dream"
    Fri Jul 18 00:00:00 EDT 2008
    For today's installment of Mailbag Friday, our question comes from VT subscriber Barry Francolino in Romania. (One of our many far-flung correspondents!) Barry writes, "Just interested to know where the word/phrase/idea pipe dream comes from." The definition given by the Visual Thesaurus, "a fantastic but vain hope (from fantasies induced by the opium pipe)," gives a whiff of its origin.

  8. Word Routes

     For Whomst Does the Neologism Toll?
    Fri Feb 23 00:00:00 EST 2018
    Sometimes — mayhaps many times — we need words to help us make fun of other words, not to mention the preening posers who use them, including ourselves.

  9. Contest

     Today's Visual Thesaurus Crossword Puzzle... And Contest!
    Sat Apr 14 00:00:00 EDT 2007
    Now, you may have noticed the word "contest" in the headline. What's the contest? We challenge you to figure out the theme of today's crossword. (Hint: It's a Visual Thesaurus puzzle -- so, um, the Visual Thesaurus just might help!) We'll send the first ten winners our exclusive -- and very cool -- Visual Thesaurus t-shirt! Once you know the theme, let us know by clicking here. Deadline is May 1, 2007. Okay, start your mental engines...

  10. Language Lounge

     Talk About Silence
    Mon Sep 03 00:00:00 EDT 2012
    An overlooked virtue of silence is its role as the desirable condition of creatures when there is not anything in particular that they need to say or do, and its great merit in being a state less likely to lead to trouble than its opposite: talk.
128 129 130 131 132 Displaying 1291-1300 of 3460 Results