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Candlepower
Beyond Google's Alphabet: Brand Names from the Lingo of Language
Thu Aug 13 00:00:00 EDT 2015
Alphabet, Google's new parent company, has generated lots of business buzz this week. But the choice of "Alphabet" for the company's name is equally newsworthy. Not only does it signal a departure from Google's blandly descriptive naming style — Google Plus, Google Maps, Google Mail, and so on — but it also takes an imaginative flight away from geek-speak and toward a universe of names inspired by language and literature.
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Word Count
Why Writers Make the Most Effective Complainers
Mon Aug 10 00:00:00 EDT 2015
My 20-year-old son, who's studying to become an opera singer, last year gave me a complaint he'd written about one of his professors. He wanted to know if it was "too harsh." More importantly, because the complaint was to be anonymous, he wanted reassurance it couldn't be traced back to him.
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Blog Excerpts
How Hard is it to Conquer Scrabble in Another Language?
Thu Aug 06 00:00:00 EDT 2015
When English-language Scrabble champ Nigel Richards, who does not speak French, won a French-language Scrabble championship, analysts rushed to analyze how much memorization that actually entailed. Ben Zimmer explains that to get a full understanding of Richards' achievement, a simple counting of words in the dictionary only gives a partial picture.
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Evasive Maneuvers
Bladder Spasms and Other Containment Anomalies
Wed Aug 05 00:00:00 EDT 2015
We're in the middle of one of the most important transitions in a democracy: from one Batman to another. But as the era of Ben Affleck (Batfleck) rapidly approaches, former Batman Christian Bale recently offered wise words to his successor on how he should be able to relieve himself.
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Language Lounge
The Art of the Burlesque, 21st-Century Style
Mon Aug 03 00:00:00 EDT 2015
Laughter is always good medicine, and today the Internet has put at our disposal the ability to draw it out through the combination in unexpected ways of two things that pervade modern culture: pictorial representation and vernacular language.
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Word Count
Don't You Understand English?
Fri Jul 31 00:00:00 EDT 2015
Jan Schreiber, a noted poet, critic, and translator, notes that traversing the border between American and British dialects of English can reveal unexpected complexities. "The challenge, if we choose to pose and accept it, is to translate one into the other," he writes.
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Word Routes
How Did We Get the "Heebie-Jeebies"?
Wed Jul 29 00:00:00 EDT 2015
For Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I look at the origins of an expression that turns nervousness and apprehension into a jokey malady: the heebie-jeebies. It turns out we can pin down not just the coiner but the very day that he coined the word.
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Word Count
Charles Dickens' Animism
Tue Jul 28 00:00:00 EDT 2015
Years ago John Lennon declared the Beatles "more popular than Jesus"; he could have more accurately expressed their impact had he said they were more popular than Charles Dickens. Popularity on the Dickens/Beatles level means to be loved by virtually everyone in one's own and subsequent eras with heartfelt admiration and respect.
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Behind the Dictionary
Trump-mentum? Bernie-mentum? The Return of a Popular Electoral Suffix
Mon Jul 27 00:00:00 EDT 2015
Whether you like or loathe it, I bet you've noticed the return of –mentum: a suffix that fills the Internet during election season much as a sulfurous smell fills hell. This suffix is also a terrific reminder of a sad truth: the media will never, ever treat a presidential election as anything more than a sporting event with fewer concussions.
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Word Routes
Is "Southpaw" from Boxing or Baseball?
Fri Jul 24 00:00:00 EDT 2015
With the boxing movie "Southpaw" opening, it's a good time to ponder where the term "southpaw" came from as an epithet for a left-hander. Baseball and boxing have both used the term for a long time to label lefty athletes, but which came first?
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