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  1. Department of Word Lists

     For Valentine's Day: Love Words From Shakespeare
    Fri Feb 13 00:00:00 EST 2015
    At a time when every civilized man carried a sonnet to his secret lover tucked into a back pocket, Shakespeare's sonnets out-swooned every other swoon-seeker's, and Sonnet 116 "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," has remained a favorite of lovers everywhere. For Valentine's Day, master some tricky words using our Sonnet 116 Vocabulary List.

  2. Blog Excerpts

     One Man's Quest to Correct "Comprise" Usage
    Thu Feb 12 13:00:00 EST 2015
    The story of Steve Henderson — a software engineer bent on single-handedly fixing every use of the word comprise in Wikipedia entries where compose would be more appropriate — has captured the popular imagination. Yesterday, Southern California Public Radio invited our own Ben Zimmer to explain the difference and weigh in on the wisdom of Henderson's quest.

  3. Blog Excerpts

     Looking Back on Jon Stewart's Portman-Coinages
    Wed Feb 11 14:00:00 EST 2015
    Last night, Jon Stewart announced that he will be retiring from Comedy Central's The Daily Show. We'll miss Stewart and his writing team for lots of reasons. But as dedicated vocabularians, we'll be especially sorry to see the end of Stewart's skewering of overhyped news through clever use of word blending, known as portmanteaus.

  4. Word Count

     The Sound of Writing
    Wed Feb 11 00:00:00 EST 2015
    The dog ate the food. That's writing at its plainest. Each word has a definite, well-known meaning, the signifiers point to their signifieds just like they're supposed to. If we know how to read, we have no trouble seeing Fido happily munching his kibble.

  5. Word Routes

     Here's a Pop Quiz: Where the Heck Did "Quiz" Come From?
    Mon Feb 09 00:00:00 EST 2015
    Quiz is a word with a background so baffling it might make you feel a bit quizzical. For Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast, I delve into the mysterious origins of quiz and its long-forgotten brother quoz.

  6. Evasive Maneuvers

     Gadswookers! Catastrophic Euphemism Failures
    Thu Feb 05 00:00:00 EST 2015
    Turns out the American Dialect Society callously disregarded my selection of conscious uncoupling (Gwyneth Paltrow's cuckoo-bananas term for divorce) for Euphemism of the Year. Instead, these linguists, lexicographers, word mavens, and rogue wordanistas selected EIT: an abbreviation of enhanced interrogation techniques, which is a euphemism of a euphemism.

  7. Language Lounge

     Light Up: A Linguistic Illumination
    Mon Feb 02 00:00:00 EST 2015
    2015 is the International Year of Light. The Language Lounge will observe the solemnity of the occasion in a more low-tech way, by taking up the idea of light in language. It's one of the most productive concepts for metaphor in English.

  8. Blog Excerpts

     A Junior Dictionary Kerfuffle
    Mon Feb 02 00:00:00 EST 2015
    "The lexicographic kerfuffle, thank goodness, isn't dead," writes Stefan Fatsis in The New Yorker. Fatsis is referring to the recent controversy over the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which has substituted all-natural words like "almond," "blackberry," and "minnow," with such 21st-century fare as "blog," "chatroom," and "database." Some noted writers have said they are "profoundly alarmed" by the changes. Read all about it here.

  9. Word Count

     How to Help Your Writing by Talking Like an Athlete
    Thu Jan 29 00:00:00 EST 2015
    Are you a writer so addicted to self-sabotage that you regularly trash-talk to yourself? You know what I mean. You say things like: "I really don't know how to write..." "My boss is going to hate this..." "Readers are going to be so bored..."

  10. Blog Excerpts

     Getting on a First-Name Basis with Winter Storms
    Tue Jan 27 00:00:00 EST 2015
    East Coast residents (outside of New England) might have been a bit underwhelmed by the blizzard-that-wasn't known as "Winter Storm Juno." While this "junior" storm has fallen short of the hyped-up expectations, it's still interesting to consider how it achieved named status in the first place.
44 45 46 47 48 Displaying 451-460 of 3488 Results