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Word Routes

Tue Jun 10 00:00:00 EDT 2008

Hillary Clinton suspended her presidential campaign over the weekend, allowing Barack Obama to claim the mantle of "presumptive nominee" for the Democratic Party. Of course, many in the media had already bestowed that title on Obama the previous Tuesday, after the vaunted "superdelegates" gave him an insurmountable lead in the delegate count. John McCain achieved the same feat on the Republican side back in early February when Mitt Romney pulled out of the race, though it took another month for Mike Huckabee to withdraw and seal the deal on McCain's "presumptive" status. It's a word we hear every election cycle, but Word Routes reader Courtney S. asks, where does it come from?

Blog Du Jour

Animal Sounds

Tue Jun 10 00:00:00 EDT 2008

In Japanese, dogs say wan wan, but in Greek they say gav gav. Onomatopoetic words for animal sounds can be surprisingly different from language to language.

Derek Abbott's Animal Noise Page

Quack-Project

Animal Sounds in Foreign Languages

"Bad Language"

Buzzwords from Hell

Mon Jun 09 00:00:00 EDT 2008

I heard a great joke the other day: "If you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, eventually one of them would write Hey Hey We're the Monkees!" I liked it so much that I used it on my website. It came back to me this morning as I was thinking about buzzwords. I mean, how do people come up with the jargon that gets stuffed into press releases and so on?

Word Routes

The Year of the "Superdelegate"

Fri Jun 06 00:00:00 EDT 2008

This past week saw Barack Obama clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, with the commitments of undecided "superdelegates" putting him over the top. Even though the term superdelegate has been kicking around Democratic circles since 1981, the word has achieved new prominence this year, when all eyes were on these unpledged party leaders to break the primary deadlock between Obama and Hillary Clinton. We're less than halfway through 2008, but superdelegate has already emerged as a formidable candidate for Word of the Year.

Blog Excerpts

World Accents

Thu Jun 05 00:00:00 EDT 2008

Want to hear the difference between English as spoken in Chicago and Liverpool, or Delhi and Alabama? The University of Edinburgh's Sound Comparisons lets you listen to a variety of English accents from around the Anglophone world. It's an eye-opening trip through the diversity of World English.

Blog Du Jour

Culinary Lingo

Wed Jun 04 00:00:00 EDT 2008

Passionate about food and language? These online epicures have got your number.

Polyglot Vegetarian

New York City Food and Drink

The Food Timeline

Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages

Word Count

Why You Should Think of Yourself as an Orange

Wed Jun 04 00:00:00 EDT 2008

Stuck with your writing? Hitting a roadblock? Feeling you just can't go any further? Here is a game to help. It will sound a little crazy but, trust me, it works.

Word Routes

A Big "Guerdon" for Spelling Bee Champ

Tue Jun 03 00:00:00 EDT 2008

A hearty congratulations from all of us here at the Visual Thesaurus to Sameer Mishra, winner of the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee! Sameer, a 13-year-old from West Lafayette, Indiana, triumphed over his competitors by correctly spelling a very fitting word in the final round: guerdon, meaning "reward or payment." His reward was $35,000 in cash and various other prizes. The second-place finisher, Sidharth Chand of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, performed admirably on words like introuvable ("impossible to find"), but he eventually erred in spelling prosopopoeia, a personifying figure of speech.