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  1. Blog Excerpts

     Is Technology Destroying Language?
    Mon Dec 08 00:00:00 EST 2014
    In an interview with BBC Future, Ben Zimmer, executive editor of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus, weighed in on the question, "Is technology changing language?" Watch this video to find out why the pace of change in language right now makes this an "exhilarating time."

  2. Teachers at Work

     The Art of Subterfuge: Using Pop Culture to Create Interest in the Classics
    Fri Dec 05 00:00:00 EST 2014
    Teachers, let's be honest. Most kids these days are more interested in the watching the latest video, writing a text, checking their social media or sending a Snapchat than they are digging into Mark Twain's Huck Finn (there's a movie for that).

  3. Evasive Maneuvers

     Metahuman Anomaly Activity and Other Character Concerns
    Wed Dec 03 00:00:00 EST 2014
    When potential tourist-carrying SpaceShipTwo crashed, resulting in one death, you just knew there would be some euphemisms to explain the disaster. The euph of choice was anomaly.

  4. Blog Excerpts

     The Rise of "Cyber Monday"... and New Light on "Black Friday"
    Mon Dec 01 11:00:00 EST 2014
    Today is "Cyber Monday," the day that retailers have anointed as the kickoff of the online holiday shopping season. "Cyber Monday" is a recent coinage, going back to a 2005 press release. "Black Friday," on which "Cyber Monday" is modeled, goes back to the early 1960s, and some newly discovered evidence illuminates its early use.

  5. Language Lounge

     They Also Serve Who Only Kvetch and Tweet
    Mon Dec 01 00:00:00 EST 2014
    Have you ever sent a really EPIC tweet? There are different ways to answer that question: I'll proceed with one way that probably doesn't occur to you. The EPIC tweets under the microscope here are tweets that are of interest to Project EPIC — that is, Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis.

  6. Blog Excerpts

     Back in Black: On the Origins of "Black Friday"
    Fri Nov 28 00:00:00 EST 2014
    On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, Americans kick off the holiday shopping season with a bang. We look back to a Word Routes column by lexicographer Ben Zimmer exploring the origins of the phrase "Black Friday." It is not, as many believe, the day when retailers' balance sheets change from red to black.

  7. Word Count

     A Serving of Grammar for Thanksgiving
    Wed Nov 26 00:00:00 EST 2014
    Last year for Thanksgiving, I did something gastronomically delicious but linguistically impossible: I dry-brined my turkey. The very word brine implies water. Tons of seafaring stories reference the briny deep as a euphemism for the salty sea. So what could a dry-brine possibly be?

  8. Dog Eared

     Let's Talk Turkey: A Word That's Waddled Round the Globe
    Tue Nov 25 00:00:00 EST 2014
    Although turkeys were domesticated by Native Americans, turkey itself is not a Native American word. In this excerpt from a new book The Language of Food, linguist and Stanford University professor Dan Jurafsky charts the complicated path the word turkey followed into English, then serves up a slice of etymological pecan pie.

  9. Word Count

     Homer's All Too Human Heroes
    Mon Nov 24 00:00:00 EST 2014
    Sing, goddess, sing the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus... The Iliad's immortal opening lines have let countless generations of readers know just what to expect from this primal epic poem of Western literature—angry men at war—and they have not been and never will be disappointed.

  10. Word Count

     Ending the Tug of War over Parallelism
    Fri Nov 21 00:00:00 EST 2014
    Parallelism is something copyeditors obsess about and writers take little notice of. If we could meet in the middle, our sentences would be a lot happier. Parallelism is no more than matching parts of a sentence or multiple sentences grammatically. It creates balance and rhythm in the sentence and brings order and clarity to meaning.
47 48 49 50 51 Displaying 481-490 of 3488 Results