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  1. Language Lounge

     Liberating Words
    Fri Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2016
    We're coming up on the 240th anniversary of the signing of the chief founding document of the United States, the one we call the Declaration of Independence—now its official title, even though that wording doesn't appear on the document itself. When written, the document called itself "the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America," admittedly less catchy than the name that now prevails.

  2. Candlepower

     There's Something About "Thing"
    premium content - available only to Visual Thesaurus subcribers Mon Jun 27 00:00:00 EDT 2016
    When the British entrepreneur Kevin Ashton was searching, in 1999, for a term to describe a network of computers with their own means of gathering information and understanding the world, he didn't resort to a noun pileup like "Object Connectivity Matrix." He didn't coin a cute word like "Sensorius." Instead, he gave this dawning phenomenon a name that incorporates one of the oldest words in the English language. He called it the Internet of Things.

  3. Word Count

     Finding the Facts in Fiction: Dreiser's "The Bulwark"
    Mon Jun 20 00:00:00 EDT 2016
    All fiction rests on a foundation of fact. Even if an author describes five-headed creatures who live on Planet Zobar and drink purple water, he or she must give readers enough feeling of life for us to imagine the world the words create.

  4. Word Count

     How to Stop Using Email to Procrastinate About Writing
    Thu Jun 16 00:00:00 EDT 2016
    Have you ever emailed me? If so, you likely received a reply in less than 24 hours. Yet I refuse to let email rule my life. I see email as a wonderfully improbable tool that allows me to communicate quickly and easily in the blink of an eye. Still, the writing of emails is an insidious task that could easily gobble up hours out of every day.

  5. Evasive Maneuvers

     Reacting Incorrectly to Banking Task Forces
    Wed Jun 08 00:00:00 EDT 2016
    Last month I mentioned the odd new nonsense-clature lingerie company Neon Moon is using for their clothes: preposterously, numbered sizes are being replaced by lovely, beautiful, and gorgeous.That reminded me of the Arrested Development episode in which a new-age school gave Maeby Funke a crocodile rather than a C, in hopes of sparing her fragile, flower-like self-esteem. Somehow I forgot an even battier euphemism from the same episode.

  6. Word Count

     From Being In a Pickle to Hitting a Can of Corn
    Fri Jun 03 11:00:00 EDT 2016
    The language used by the National Pastime is wonderful and strange (and not all food-related) - there are things you can say in baseball that you wouldn't say anywhere anywhere else.

  7. Word Count

     Can Captain America Really Wage a "Civil" War?
    Thu Jun 02 00:00:00 EDT 2016
    Captain America: Civil War is a hit film at the early summer box office, having recently surpassed 1 billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales. The film raises a lot of questions. A basic question can be answered well before that having to do with the language of the title: How can a War be Civil?

  8. Language Lounge

     Mr. Grice, Meet Mr. Miranda
    Wed Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2016
    This month marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Miranda v. Arizona. The decision, handed down on June 13, 1966, ushered vocabulary into American English that is in nearly everyone's lexicon today, including Miranda Rights, Miranda Warnings, and even the verb mirandize, which means "recite the Miranda warnings (to a person under arrest)". Nearly 10 years after Miranda, philosopher of language Paul Grice began to develop his theory of conversational implicature and the Gricean Maxims that are part and parcel of it.

  9. Word Count

     Macaulay's Plain-Spoken History
    Thu May 26 00:00:00 EDT 2016

    Here's a perennially useful guide for choosing what book to read next: think of a title you've long known by name but never read, go straight to a library or bookstore, get it, and read it. Through decades that guide has steered me to Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Hugo's Les Miserables, all of Austen, Dickens, and Twain, and many, many more.

  10. Word Count

     The Joy of the Crappy First Draft
    Tue May 24 00:00:00 EDT 2016
    Every beginning writer I know abhors the idea of a crappy first draft. It's embarrassing, mortifying and humiliating. They know their boss or client or publisher is going to hate it. They're going to hate it themselves because they fear it will make them look inept and unskilled. Thus, they don't want to it exist on their hard-drive, even for a nanosecond. If this is your belief, I'm here to tell you you're wrong. You should LOVE your crappy first draft. You should worship it. You should seek to create it as soon as you possibly can.
30 31 32 33 34 Displaying 311-320 of 3488 Results