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  1. Word Count

     How the Visual Thesaurus Inspires the Blue Man Group
    Thu Nov 19 00:00:00 EST 2009
    We were pleased to discover that the Visual Thesaurus has fans in the Blue Man Group, the highly creative outfit that has been producing theatrical shows and concerts for the past two decades. We talked to one of the original Blue Men, Matt Goldman, about how the group has drawn on the Visual Thesaurus for inspiration in both their stage productions and in their latest venture, an innovative pre-K and elementary school known as the Blue School.

  2. Word Count

     Proscribe with Caution
    Wed Nov 18 00:00:00 EST 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 looks at some pitfalls in using the word proscribe.

  3. Word Routes

     NOAD Word of the Year: "Unfriend"
    Tue Nov 17 00:00:00 EST 2009
    The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its Word of the Year for 2009: it's unfriend, defined as "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook." Readers of this space will be quite familiar with the term, as I discussed it along with similar un-verbs on Word Routes in May and then again in September as a followup to my On Language column in the New York Times Magazine, "The Age of Undoing." It's nice to feel ahead of the curve on this one, but truth be told, unfriending has been going on for many years.

  4. Blog Excerpts

     Quadrivial Quandary
    Tue Nov 17 00:00:00 EST 2009
    Software engineer Rudi Seitz has set up a fun challenge he calls Quadrivial Quandary: "Each day we present four words from our favorite dictionary sites. Your challenge is to use them all in a sentence that illustrates their meanings." Join in the logophilia here.

  5. Word Count

     The Noun Game
    Mon Nov 16 00:00:00 EST 2009

    University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron explains how a simple grammar lesson can lead to a clash of civilizations.

    Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It's one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn't quite fit the way we're used to viewing things.

  6. Word Count

     Author Bitten By Multiple Octopuses
    Fri Nov 13 00:00:00 EST 2009
    We welcome Ben H. Winters, who follows up the runaway success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with his own Jane Austen mashup, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. As the publisher, Quirk Books, explains, "Winters expands the original text of Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, swashbuckling pirates, and other seaworthy creatures." Hmm... octopi?

  7. Blog Excerpts

     Collecting Collective Nouns
    Fri Nov 13 00:00:00 EST 2009
    Twitter is becoming a great haven for wordplay. Check out the creativity on display in tweets marked with the hashtag #collectivenouns: "a knot of string theorists," "a sneer of critics," "a wunch of bankers," "a seemingly empty room of ninjas." The website All Sorts is collecting the results of this collective online experiment.

  8. 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.

  9. Behind the Dictionary

     A Troop of One
    Wed Nov 11 00:00:00 EST 2009
    Today is Veterans Day in the United States, and linguist Neal Whitman has been thinking about a question of military usage: if "50,000 troops" refers to 50,000 people, then does "one troop" refer to one person?

  10. Lesson Plans

     Vocabulary Bursting with Energy
    Wed Nov 11 00:00:00 EST 2009
    How can students use the Visual Thesaurus to review key vocabulary associated with the sources and properties of energy?
211 212 213 214 215 Displaying 2121-2130 of 3488 Results