Search the Site

Your Search:
141 142 143 144 145 Displaying 1421-1430 of 3460 Results

  1. Evasive Maneuvers

     An Oodle of Euphs from Green's Dictionary of Slang
    Mon Nov 14 00:00:00 EST 2016
    Every month I collect and inspect a plethora of sneaky terms from sources far and wide, to share a laugh over the human race's ludicrous attempts at lexical trickery. This month, the euphs are all coming from a single source I wish to celebrate: Green's Dictionary of Slang (GDoS).

  2. Word Count

     Writing Lyrics: Finding the Music in Words
    Thu Feb 16 00:00:00 EST 2012
    Michael Lydon has contributed columns regularly here about the writer's art, but for this installment we asked him to tackle a form of writing with which he is particularly familiar: songwriting. Lydon has written about popular music since the '60s, and he also writes and performs his own music. Here he presents some songwriting advice from his "sometimes agonizing, sometimes blissful experience."

  3. Word Routes

     A "Steep Learning Curve" for "Downton Abbey"
    Fri Feb 08 00:00:00 EST 2013
    Last year, Season 2 of the popular British TV series "Downton Abbey" yielded a bumper crop of linguistic anachronisms. In Season 3, now airing stateside on PBS, the out-of-place language has continued. There was a particularly glaring anachronism in the most recently aired episode: "steep learning curve."

  4. Candlepower

     Grab Your Visitors: Home Pages That Work
    Fri Apr 18 00:00:00 EDT 2008
    As an SEO copywriter and marketing consultant, I look at a lot of Websites. When I'm asked to assess a company's site, the first question that often crosses my mind when I review it is, "Hmmm... what exactly do you do?"

  5. Candlepower

     Red-Pen Pointer: She Literally Misused the Word
    Mon Aug 18 00:00:00 EDT 2008
    A Jewish friend wrote recently to tell me that her son had been invited to join a fraternity. "It's not a Jewish fraternity," she noted, "although they have a handful, literally, of Jewish members." Now, I've known some tiny Jews in my day (some of my best friends and family are tiny Jews), but I can't imagine even one fitting in someone's hand.

  6. Word Routes

     A Wordy Weekend, from Crosswords to Palindromes
    Fri Mar 08 00:00:00 EST 2013
    This weekend, it's time once again for the best crossword solvers to gather in Brooklyn for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon, another kind of wordy celebration is going on, as the winners will be announced in the first annual Symmys Awards, given to the best palindromes of the year.

  7. Word Routes

     Choice Words from the State of the Union
    Thu Jan 27 00:00:00 EST 2011
    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.

  8. Dog Eared

     Parenting, Literally
    Mon May 07 00:00:00 EDT 2007

    The anonymous mom behind the popular parenting blog Ask Moxie wrote us to say: "Parenting is such a life-changing and inherently traumatic experience that I'd bet at least half of us have seriously considered writing a book about it. (Mine would be filled with incidents like the time my 2 1/2-year-old accidentally glued the cat to the chair.) It's hard to improve on the standards, though, so if you're too bleary-eyed and laundry-wearied* to write your own, don't feel guilty about stealing some time to read these classics of the parenting narrative genre:"

    (In reverse chronological order)

    Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It, by Andrea J. Buchanan. "A series of essays about changing identity, joy, disappointment, and negotiating the daily ebb and flow of life as a new mother, Andi's book is real and raw and encouraging. It compares the process of becoming a mother to the process of moving to a foreign country and learning the culture."

  9. Contest

     Six Degrees of the Visual Thesaurus
    Sat Sep 16 00:00:00 EDT 2006

    A few weeks ago subscriber Marije Martijn sent us a VT learning activity for students (see "Vox Populi," left column) that reminded us of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the trivia game where you link an actor through their film roles to Kevin Bacon. We here at the Visual Thesaurus love that game, and it inspired us to come up with our own twist:

    In today's contest, we challenge you to use the Visual Thesaurus to link two words together through their related words. We'll choose five entries with the fewest "degrees of separation." Winners will receive a limited edition Visual Thesaurus t-shirt. In case of ties, we'll pick winners randomly.

    The words pairs are:

    fire and sale
    news and print
    smart and card

    How do you play? Put on your cleverness cap, look up the first word in the Visual Thesaurus -- and start clicking to the right related words!

    For example, to link "be" to "do:"

    be and do
    be
    follow
    do

    Simple? Not so fast... Try connecting "be" to "strong." This one takes ingenuity. Here's what we came up with:

  10. Backstory

     Tim Maleeny, Author of "Stealing the Dragon"
    Sat Apr 21 00:00:00 EDT 2007
    How much research did you have to do before writing your book? That's one of the questions you'll hear most often if you've just published an international thriller. Implicit is the assumption all that research had to be done before the story was written, yet in reality the writing process was never that linear, especially for a first-time author.
141 142 143 144 145 Displaying 1421-1430 of 3460 Results