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  1. Wordshop

     Vocabulary and the New Common Core Standards
    Tue Oct 26 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    After years of fine-tuning individual state standards for education, the tide has turned. No longer will many administrators and teachers turn to their state standards to determine what to teach and when; they will instead look to the Common Core Standards as the new "gold standard" of standards. As of today, the Common Core State Standards Initiative — brainchild of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) — has successfully wooed at least thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia.

  2. 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.

  3. Weekly Worksheet

     Scaring up Some Superb Adjectives
    Mon Oct 25 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    Teachers, Halloween is upon us, and your students may be brewing up some spooky stories. Don't let them fall into the trap of clinging to overused intensifiers and boring adjectives!

  4. Word Routes

     "Man Up" Gets Political
    Fri Oct 22 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    When I wrote an On Language column in the New York Times Magazine last month about the rise in popularity of the expression "man up," little did I know that it would turn into one of the key catchphrases of American political discourse in advance of November's midterm elections.

  5. Word Count

     Its, It's: It's a Problem
    Thu Oct 21 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    Some pet linguistic peeves are indulged, I find, not for reasons of clarity or grammatical soundness, but out of petty pedantry, habitual curmudgeonliness, or some kind of character disorder. On the other hand, I've been accused — affectionately, I hope — of excessive tolerance in such matters. But I have peeves of my own, one of which is the confusion over its and it's.

  6. 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.

  7. Word Count

     Killer App: Will the iPhone Monitor Your Language?
    Tue Oct 19 00:00:00 EDT 2010

    Apple's latest iPhone app will clean up your text messages and force you to brush up your French, or Spanish, or Japanese, all at the same time.

    The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently approved patent 7,814,163, an Apple invention that can censor obscene or offensive words in text messages while doubling as a foreign-language tutor with the power to require, for example, "that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish."

  8. Weekly Worksheet

     Getting to the Root of "Bene"
    Mon Oct 18 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    Welcome to a new Visual Thesaurus feature for educators, the weekly worksheet! First up is a worksheet to help students explore the Latin root "bene." Click here to download, and check out our related lesson plan, "Rooting One's Way to Meaning," here.

  9. Teachers at Work

     "We're Only Doing This Because You Like Words!"
    Mon Oct 18 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    The title of this month's column is a direct quote from one of my students. Please imagine it being delivered in an accusatory tone. What caused such a lament? You see, I had the audacity to suggest that learning new words was, well, fun.

  10. Word Routes

     "Truthiness": The Silly Word that Feels Wrong in Your Mouth
    Fri Oct 15 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    This Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of the premiere episode of "The Colbert Report," Stephen Colbert's endlessly entertaining sendup of political pundit programs. On that episode, Colbert introduced the word "truthiness," which has proved so popular that it has entered the latest edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary. For my On Language column in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I had the pleasure of interviewing Colbert (as himself, not his put-upon persona) and learned the inside story of "truthiness." Here is an extended excerpt from our conversation.
175 176 177 178 179 Displaying 1761-1770 of 3488 Results