Search the Site

Your Search:
157 158 159 160 161 Displaying 1581-1590 of 3460 Results

  1. Word Count

     Aural Spellings
    Tue Sep 15 00:00:00 EDT 2009

    Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she examines what happens to the spelling of words when we follow our ears.

    My daughter, who is six, is feeling the power of the written word. She's taken to taping notes all over the house — labels for shelves and rooms and drawers, and messages to us that begin "Dere parints."

  2. Candlepower

     "Microstyle": How to Coin a Word
    Tue Aug 09 00:00:00 EDT 2011
    Christopher Johnson, a branding expert who runs the website The Name Inspector, has a new book out called Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little about how contemporary message-makers need to become "verbal miniaturists." In this excerpt, Johnson explains how "neologisms can be among the most powerful of micromessages."

  3. Teachers at Work

     Teaching the Power of Word Coinage
    Mon Dec 12 00:00:00 EST 2011
    Kitty. Tron. Legit. All these words appeared in the 2011 edition of the yearbook I sponsor. Students used these as slang; all three were used to describe something cool. Aside from legit, which seems to have been around for a while, I'm not sure the other two stuck.

  4. Evasive Maneuvers

     Work-Life Malarkey in the Entrepreneurial Economy
    Wed Nov 07 00:00:00 EST 2018
    The well of drivel will never run dry, so let's amble through the latest and worst euphemisms I've collected during the first month of my second decade as a euphemism columnist.

  5. Teachers at Work

     Deep in the Ethos: The Vocabulary of Professor-ing
    Thu Nov 29 00:00:00 EST 2012
    It's been about three months since I started my job as a teaching assistant at the University of Pittsburgh. Since doing so, I've not just left behind Brooklyn for the 'Burgh, and "Fuhgedaboutit" for "Yinz want some food?"; I've also adapted my vocabulary, too. The words I use in my classroom now are different from when I taught high school. This is a challenge, and one I've been interested to watch my students — all first-semester freshmen — take on, as well.

  6. Dog Eared

     History of English, Books
    Mon Apr 30 00:00:00 EDT 2007

    Professor Ann Curzan, the scholar on the history of English we interviewed for last week's Behind The Dictionary feature, recommends these books on the subject:

    David Crystal's The Stories of English "is packed with interesting information about the history of English."

    Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue "is a very accessible history of English."

    John McWhorter's Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English "is also accessible and treats both language change and dialectal differences."

    Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, "is a collection of short, very smart essays that address a range of myths about language -- language change, dialects, the effects of TV, etc."

    "Michael Adams and I have written an introductory textbook about English linguistics that people tell us doesn't read like your average textbook (which was absolutely our goal!): How English Works

  7. Blog Excerpts

     Which Brands Get Verbed?
    Wed Oct 20 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    On The Economist's Johnson blog, contributors are considering the question of why we "Google" and "Facebook," but we don't "PowerPoint" or "Excel." They've proposed some reasonable theories for brand-verbing.

  8. Word Routes

     The Art of the Self-Mocking Hashtag
    Fri Sep 23 00:00:00 EDT 2011
    It's fair to say that when it comes to online discourse we live in the Golden Age of Snark. (That's snark as in "snide commentary," not the imaginary animal of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "The Hunting of the Snark.") When every statement you make is open to sarcastic rebuttals, sometimes the best policy is to ridicule yourself before someone else has the chance. Nowhere is this more true than Twitter, where the convention of the "hashtag" has been pressed into the service of self-mockery.

  9. Teachers at Work

     New Approaches to Teaching Grammar in British Schools
    Mon Oct 25 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    We recently learned of a fascinating new project in the United Kingdom entitled "Teaching English Grammar in Schools," and we were pleased to see that Dan Clayton, a researcher working on the project, had spoken highly of the educational resources of the Visual Thesaurus. We got in touch with Dan to find out how the project, part of the Survey of English Usage, is promoting new approaches to the teaching of grammar based on real usage examples pulled from a corpus of texts.

  10. Backstory

     Albert A. Dalia, author of "Dream of the Dragon Pool"
    Fri Feb 08 00:00:00 EST 2008
    I suppose my mother's reading to me as a child could be logged as my first introduction to fiction. In-between my childhood delight with fiction and my fiction writing career, two masters and a Ph.D. in history happened. It was after my Ph.D. in 1985 that I returned to fiction. I guess I had exhausted my curiosity about the "truth." Or, more accurately, I had exhausted my curiosity about formal historical study as a path to understanding "reality."
157 158 159 160 161 Displaying 1581-1590 of 3460 Results