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Contest
The Visual Thesaurus Crossword Puzzle: January Edition
Fri Jan 30 00:00:00 EST 2009
Welcome to the January edition of the Visual Thesaurus crossword puzzle. Figure out the hidden word chain and you could win a Visual Thesaurus T-shirt!
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Blog Excerpts
On the Trail of "Wombat"
Fri Jan 30 00:00:00 EST 2009
How the word "wombat" entered the English language turns out to be a surprisingly complex story. Australian linguist David Nash tells the tale here.
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Teachers at Work
Lightening Struck: Strange Errors from the College Classroom
Thu Jan 29 00:00:00 EST 2009
David Hollander is a critically acclaimed novelist and essayist who teaches fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College. We asked him to share some of the more peculiar recurring errors of spelling and usage that he's come across in his students' work.
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Dog Eared
The Best of Updike
Thu Jan 29 00:00:00 EST 2009
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Lesson Plans
Figurative Language in Toni Morrison's "A Mercy"
Wed Jan 28 00:00:00 EST 2009
How can the Visual Thesaurus help students interpret figurative language in Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy?
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Blog Du Jour
Updike at Rest
Wed Jan 28 00:00:00 EST 2009
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Word Routes
Mixing and Mashing Words (With a Little Moshing)
Tue Jan 27 00:00:00 EST 2009
A blog commenter recently described the linguistic situation in her household as "a mixmash of English and German." As she later explained, the word mixmash was invented by her daughters to describe their experiences growing up bilingual. Now, mixmash is not a word you'll find in any dictionary, but it's easy enough to appreciate it as a mash-up of mix and ( mish) mash. It's a wonderful example of how speakers of English are constantly mixing and mashing the lexicon, and yet somehow we manage to understand each other just fine.
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"Bad Language"
What's the Source?
Mon Jan 26 00:00:00 EST 2009
Back when I was a freelance journalist, I had to source all my articles properly. This meant getting objective proof of facts and assertions, typically by interview or with reference to government or company publications. I try to carry this attitude through into my corporate work.
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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.
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Word Routes
Taking the Oath of Office... Faithfully
Thu Jan 22 00:00:00 EST 2009
Last night an unusual event happened at the White House. Chief Justice John Roberts re-administered the presidential oath of office to Barack Obama, a day and a half after they had performed the same ritual rather shakily in the inaugural ceremony. White House counsel Gregory B. Craig explained: "We believe that the oath of office was administered effectively and that the president was sworn in appropriately yesterday. But the oath appears in the Constitution itself, and out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath a second time."
What was that one out-of-sequence word? Faithfully.
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