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  1. Word Count

     When Words Describe Themselves, Or Sound Like They Do
    Thu Jan 30 00:00:00 EST 2014
    Many paradoxes are tied up with language, specifically language's ability for self-reference. This self-reference causes a loop it can be difficult to get out of. Beyond creating paradoxes, it also raises the question of whether the individual sounds in words mean things.

  2. Blog Excerpts

     Pete Seeger Knew That English is Crazy
    Wed Jan 29 00:00:00 EST 2014
    The great folk-music pioneer Pete Seeger died on Monday at the age of 94. He's best known for such classics as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?," "If I Had a Hammer," and "Turn, Turn, Turn!" But we're particularly fond of a song that he performed about the irrationality of the English language, "English is Cuh-Ray-Zee."

  3. Blog Excerpts

     Talking Football Lingo as the Super Bowl Approaches
    Tue Jan 28 00:00:00 EST 2014
    With the Super Bowl just around the corner, our own Ben Zimmer talked to Seattle's KUOW about the origins of some football language. Some of the terms, like "the 12th man" and "the Legion of Boom," have special resonance in Seattle, home of the Super Bowl-bound Seahawks.

  4. Word Count

     Word Tasting Note: "Supercilious"
    Mon Jan 27 00:00:00 EST 2014
    We welcome back James Harbeck for another installment of his "Word Tasting Notes." Here he considers "a word for people who look at things with the arch eyebrows and droopy eyelids of cool superiority," supercilious.

  5. Blog Excerpts

     A Popular History of Language Peeves
    Fri Jan 24 00:00:00 EST 2014
    Language writer Jen Doll takes on the phenomenon of linguistic "peeving" for the Atlantic and collects a list of "classics." See any you recognize?

  6. Word Count

     Made Up: Fictional, Fictitious, Fictive, and Factitious
    Thu Jan 23 00:00:00 EST 2014
    When coming up with adjectives for made-up things, we have many to choose among: fictional, fictitious, or fictive, or even factitious. Choose wisely, or risk saying something you don't mean.

  7. Blog Excerpts

     If "Sam & Cat" Can't Get a Word Into the Dictionary, Who Can?
    Wed Jan 22 00:00:00 EST 2014
    It's a popularly held idea that dictionary writers have the power to add words to the lexicon when in fact language is changed the by people who use it and the job of the lexigrographer is to take note. Our own Ben Zimmer revisits this distinction in a look at a recent episode of the Nickelodeon teen comedy "Sam & Cat," in which the titular characters take on word-creation head on.

  8. Dog Eared

     A New Edition of an Old, Reliable, Witty Book of Quotes
    Tue Jan 21 00:00:00 EST 2014
    Wit lovers rejoice! There's a new edition (the fifth) of The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. Gyles Brandreth has taken the editorial reins from the late Ned Sherrin, and the new edition fine-tunes what was already an impressive and entertaining reference work.

  9. Word Count

     Banning Words for the New Year
    Mon Jan 20 00:00:00 EST 2014
    In the spirit of New Year's resolutions like quit smoking, lose weight, exercise more, each January brings new calls to ban words, the linguistic equivalent of losing weight. But while New Year's resolutions are self-imposed — I decide that an hour on the elliptical watching Sherlock would be better than an hour on the couch with Sherlock and a bowl of chips — word bans tend to be imposed by someone else.

  10. Blog Excerpts

     The Best Punctuation Marks in Literature
    Mon Jan 20 00:00:00 EST 2014
    On New York Magazine's Vulture blog, Kathryn Schulz has compiled what she considers the five best uses of punctuation in the history of literature. From the colon in Dickens's A Christmas Carol ("Marley was dead: to begin with") to the ellipses in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," it's a fascinating list. Read it here.
65 66 67 68 69 Displaying 661-670 of 3488 Results