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  1. Word Routes

     The Word of the Year is... "Bailout"!
    Mon Jan 12 00:00:00 EST 2009
    Greetings, everyone! I've just come back from San Francisco, where I attended the American Dialect Society's annual meeting (held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America). As is the custom, the linguists and lexicographers in attendance took a break from their scholarly presentations to have some fun selecting the Word of the Year for 2008. This time around, bailout emerged as a powerful frontrunner, and sure enough it ultimately proved to be the winner.

  2. Blog Excerpts

     Dr. Johnson's Dictionary
    Fri Jan 09 00:00:00 EST 2009
    This year marks the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson, the great pioneer of English-language lexicography. To celebrate, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University has launched Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, which presents a word a day from Johnson's landmark Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Words are taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition held at Beinecke, adorned with handwritten corrections by Johnson and his helpers. Some early selections follow below.

  3. Dog Eared

     Illuminated Manuscripts
    Fri Jan 09 00:00:00 EST 2009

    Feast your eyes on these books showcasing the beautiful tradition of manuscript illumination.

    Masterpieces of Illumination

    Marvellous to Behold

    A History of Illuminated Manuscript

    Bibles and Bestiaries

  4. Word Routes

     Get Your Shovels Ready!
    Thu Jan 08 00:00:00 EST 2009
    The countdown is on for the American Dialect Society's selection for 2008 Word of the Year, the oldest and most prestigious WOTY event in the land. The ADS selection will happen Friday, January 9, at the group's annual meeting, held this year in San Francisco. The voting is open to the public, so Visual Thesaurus readers in the Bay area are welcome to drop in for the WOTY fun. I'll be attending (I'm on the ADS Executive Council), and I have a few favorites I'll be lobbying for. One of them is a word that offers a ray of light in our current moment of economic doom and gloom: shovel-ready.

  5. Evasive Maneuvers

     Fruits and Flowers and Cheese and Crackers, Oh My!
    Wed Jan 07 00:00:00 EST 2009

    "Without euphemisms, there could be no good, so it must be good to be euphemistic sometimes."

    So said George Washington at his Mount Vernon farm, setting the United States on its course as a euphemism-friendly nation, a path that is our patriotic duty to embrace.

  6. Word Routes

     That's So Boss!
    Tue Jan 06 00:00:00 EST 2009
    A New York Times article yesterday about Google Book Search features some research I did on the petulant phrase "You're not the boss of me!" This is an expression that many people suppose is rather recent — some might have first come across it in the past five or ten years, while others might fancy that this bit of kid-speak is restricted to their own family usage. But using Google Book Search, it's easy to find examples all the way back to 1883.

  7. Candlepower

     Red Pen Diaries: Exclamation Nation
    Mon Jan 05 00:00:00 EST 2009

    Everybody knows there are rules regarding punctuation. This article isn't about them.

    I'm on a lot of e-mail lists; a great many people feel I should be kept abreast of developments at their companies, career milestones of the artists they represent, legislative or electoral triumphs and outrages, and too much more. And though I find some of the news they herald noteworthy, more often than not they compensate for mundane content with an inappropriate, nay, giddy level of enthusiasm. The primary means of expressing this overwrought intensity? The exclamation point.

  8. Backstory

     Karen Dionne, Author of "Freezing Point"
    Fri Jan 02 00:00:00 EST 2009
    I've always wanted to be a scientist. But in the early 1970s, the pull of the hippie movement was strong. After dropping out of the University of Michigan, I married a stoneware potter, and for several years my husband and I made our living traveling throughout Michigan and surrounding states selling his work at art shows.

  9. Language Lounge

     Oi!
    Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2009
    In this anniversary edition of Language Lounge we return to the topic that started it all — sound symbolism — in our quest to learn the true meaning of /oi/.

  10. Blog Excerpts

     Pronouncing the World's Words
    Wed Dec 31 00:00:00 EST 2008
    Forvo is a new website where you can find a huge array of words pronounced in their original languages. Native speakers can upload their own pronunciations — it's "crowdsourcing" at its best.
248 249 250 251 252 Displaying 2491-2500 of 3488 Results