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Blog Excerpts
Bad Characters
Thu Aug 14 00:00:00 EDT 2008
Hanzi Smatter is a blog "dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture." Find out what that tattoo really says.
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Dog Eared
Speaking of Chinese...
Wed Aug 13 00:00:00 EDT 2008
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Word Routes
Stumbling over "Synecdoche"
Tue Aug 12 00:00:00 EDT 2008
It's happened again: Los Angeles Times readers are up in arms over vocabulary. Last time it was a contretemps over a letter to the editor complaining about tough words like, um, contretemps. This time it's commenters on the LA Times movie blog, "The Big Picture," who are slamming a post about the title of a forthcoming movie, Synecdoche, New York.
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Blog Du Jour
Chinese Language Blogs
Tue Aug 12 00:00:00 EDT 2008
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Word Count
Are You Willing to Talk About the Elephant in the Room?
Mon Aug 11 00:00:00 EDT 2008
A friend of mine recently did something dangerous. No, she didn't ride a motorcycle up a mountain during a lightning storm, try bungee jumping off a bridge or attempt to go windsurfing with belugas. Here's her confession: When submitting an RFQ she included a brief personal essay.
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Word Routes
Mailbag Friday: "Mad Hatter"
Fri Aug 08 00:00:00 EDT 2008
Today's question for Mailbag Friday comes to us from Valerie P. of Ottawa, Ontario. Valerie writes: "I was visiting a heritage village in Nova Scotia when a guide in a traditional tailor's house told me the origin of the expression, mad hatter. He said that the beaver fur the popular top hats were made of was preserved with mercury. The workers gradually absorbed this mercury while making the hats and eventually became mad. The explanation seems a bit sketchy; can you fill in the details, or correct the explanation?"
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Word Routes
Medical Misapprehensions
Thu Aug 07 00:00:00 EDT 2008
On the Web you can find some well-traveled lists of medical malapropisms, supposedly collected from patients who misunderstand names of diseases and medications. So for instance, Alzheimer's disease becomes old-timer's disease, sickle-cell anemia becomes sick as hell anemia, spinal meningitis becomes smilin' mighty Jesus, and phenobarbital becomes peanut butter balls. These lists are good for a laugh, but it turns out misunderstandings of medical terminology can sometimes have dangerous or even deadly consequences.
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Blog Excerpts
A New Word for New Life
Thu Aug 07 00:00:00 EDT 2008
On Wired Science, Brandom Keim has coined a new word: astrobioethics, "a branch of ethics involving the implications of life science in space." He's hoping his neologism will make it into the dictionaries some day.
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Behind the Dictionary
Inside the OED, Part 2: Expanding Electronically
Wed Aug 06 00:00:00 EDT 2008
Last week in part one of our interview with Oxford English Dictionary editor at large Jesse Sheidlower, we talked about the OED's century-and-a-half reliance on volunteer readers to help gather historical citations — a practice now trendily called "crowdsourcing." This week we delve into how the OED has adapted to the digital age through the creation of the online edition, which includes the entire text of the 20-volume print edition as well as all the newly revised material for the planned Third Edition. It's an unprecedented electronic undertaking, but some worry that it presages the end of the print OED.
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Dog Eared
Online Research
Wed Aug 06 00:00:00 EDT 2008
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