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  1. Word Count

     Is It "Set Up," "Set-Up," or "Setup"?
    Thu Aug 07 10:00:00 EDT 2014
    Here is the latest in a series of tips on usage and style shared by Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. One of Mignon's correspondents inquires about when setup should appear as a single, unbroken word, and when there should be a space or a hyphen between set and up.

  2. Blog Excerpts

     Why You'll Be Able to Play "Qajaq" in Scrabble
    Wed Aug 06 00:00:00 EDT 2014
    The new edition of the official Scrabble dictionary is being released, and with it come 5,000 new words that North American players will be able to make with their tiles. There are helpful two-letter words like DA, GI, PO, and TE, but perhaps most interesting are such oddities as QAJAQ and QUINZHEE. It turns out those are both Inuit words, included because the Canadian Oxford Dictionary is one of the sources. Read all about it in the National Post here.

  3. Evasive Maneuvers

     Tender Undoing and Other Surface Coal
    Wed Aug 06 00:00:00 EDT 2014
    We have another Euphemism of the Year candidate—and perhaps an entirely new category. In reference to her impending divorce, singer Jewel called the event a tender undoing, apparently seeking to create a more gibberish-soaked term than conscious uncoupling, which Gwyneth Paltrow famously used to describe her own divorce.

  4. Word Routes

     The Joy of Making Up Long Words
    Mon Aug 04 00:00:00 EDT 2014
    Last week, as part of the Lexicon Valley podcast, I talked about how the word discombobulate grew out of a vogue in the Jacksonian era for making up jocular polysyllabic words with a pseudo-classical air. That impulse for concocting silly-sounding sesquipedalianisms has often bubbled up in the history of English.

  5. Language Lounge

     There's Something Fishy (and Corny and Cheesy) About the "-Y" Suffix
    Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 2014
    A peculiar feature of some adjectives ending in -y is their ability to take on a semantic life of their own, separate from the meaning of their root. A handful of food-based adjectives fit this pattern, in which an English learner would be at a great disadvantage in thinking that the adjective's meaning might be composable from its parts. Think of corny, meaty, fishy, and cheesy.

  6. Blog Excerpts

     What Do You Call a Group Selfie?
    Thu Jul 31 00:00:00 EDT 2014
    If a "selfie" is a photograph of oneself, then what do you call a self-portrait of a group of people? The Associated Press has a suggestion: "An 'usie,' of course! As in 'us.' Pronounced uss-ee, rhymes with 'fussy.'" Read the AP article, which quotes our own Ben Zimmer, here, and then check out Mark Peters' exploration of "selfie" variants here.

  7. Wordshop

     Common at the Core: The Shared Vocabulary of State Standards for Language Arts
    Thu Jul 31 00:00:00 EDT 2014
    There has been a lot of hubbub over the last few months about states defecting from the original group of 45 states that had adopted the Common Core State Standards. But how different are the state standards that have diverged from the Common Core when it comes to the teaching of vocabulary?

  8. Word Count

     What's It Worth? A Confusing Use of the Apostrophe
    Wed Jul 30 00:00:00 EDT 2014
    I asked fellow editors recently what usage rule they wanted to know more about or what rule they saw broken regularly. I received lots of answers (thanks, all!), including this one: "Why is worth preceded with a possessive noun or pronoun, as in two days' worth?"

  9. Blog Excerpts

     "Love, Love, Love": The Beatles Kept It Simple, Word-Wise
    Tue Jul 29 00:00:00 EDT 2014
    Adding to our collection of Beatles linguistic analysis (we've written about the iconic band's pronouns, nonsense sounds, and gear language) and in a manner reminiscent of recent analysis of rappers' vocabularies, the Liverpool Echo has conducted a vocabulary survey of British pop music, and concluded that the Beatles "have one of the smallest vocabularies in pop music."

  10. Word Routes

     Getting "Discombobulated" on Lexicon Valley
    Mon Jul 28 00:00:00 EDT 2014
    On Lexicon Valley, Slate's podcast about language, I'm taking part in a regular feature. I come prepared with a mystery word, and the hosts have to guess the word itself and its origins. The first word didn't remain a mystery for very long: discombobulate.
53 54 55 56 57 Displaying 541-550 of 3488 Results