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  1. Word Count

     Killing the Zombies: Split Infinitives, "Hopefully," and Singular "They"
    Mon Aug 12 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    This summer, I've been looking at zombie rules, false grammar rules taught and followed slavishly with little thought. Today, I'll kill three final zombies: the split infinitive, hopefully, and singular they. They're style rules — albeit awkward ones — that are lumbering around as grammar rules.

  2. Weekly Worksheet

     MLK and the Mighty Metaphor
    Fri Aug 09 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    August 28, 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King's monumental "I Have a Dream” speech. In commemoration of King's life and his way with words, this week's worksheet leads students through an analysis of how King used figurative language in his "I Have a Dream" speech.

  3. Word Routes

     Keeping a Watch on "Binge-Watching"
    Fri Aug 09 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    The eagerly anticipated final season of "Breaking Bad" has led to a lot of viewers catching up on past episodes marathon-style. For my latest Wall Street Journal column, I use this moment of mass-media consumption to dive into the history of "binge-watching."

  4. Blog Excerpts

     Should "Tweeps" Be in the Dictionary?
    Thu Aug 08 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Library Journal and Oxford University Press recently organized a webcast entitled "Should 'Tweeps' Be in the Dictionary?" about the role of dictionaries in the age of social media. Participating were Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries at OUP, Henrietta Thornton-Verma, reviews editor at Library Journal, and Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus. Read Thornton-Verma's recap here, and listen to the full webcast here.

  5. Evasive Maneuvers

     Malarkey-Inspired Euphemisms
    Wed Aug 07 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Rebranding — which is a heckuva euphemism itself — has been the root cause of many euphemisms over the years, as fish have become sea kittens and rich jerks have become job creators. The latest attempt at ridiculous, retch-worthy rebranding is knowledge people: in other words, librarians.

  6. Word Count

     Why Being Relentless is a Good Writing Strategy
    Tue Aug 06 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    I can't remember who told me about Jonathan Mann but I'm grateful for the tip. I don't spend enough time on the Internet to have accidentally stumbled across this guy who has been writing a song a day for the last four-plus years.

  7. Word Count

     What I Read This Summer
    Mon Aug 05 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Day after day of 90+ degree heat seems to melt our brains into neuronic mushes far too soggy for heavy reading, and we become capable only of lazing through lighter-than-air fare. A memorable New Yorker cartoon tells the story: a stern cop, looming over a sunbather reading Crime and Punishment, says, "I'm sorry, sir, but Dostoyevsky is not considered summer reading."

  8. Word Routes

     How "Drone" Got Off the Ground
    Fri Aug 02 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    For my most recent "Word on the Street" column in the Wall Street Journal, I consider the history of a word very much in the news: drone, referring to a pilotless aircraft guided by remote control. It turns out the term has been on a long, strange trip from early prototypes in the 1930s to the current controversial U.S. program of covert drone strikes.

  9. Language Lounge

     Of Obscure Origin
    Thu Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    During the five or so years that I have been writing the Word of the Day feature for the Visual Thesaurus, I have noticed a pattern: certain words in English that sound and feel just right — words that are easy to remember and fun to use because their sound seems to evoke the thing they stand for so well — are often of unknown, obscure, or disputed origins. Is this just a coincidence? Read on and decide for yourself.

  10. Word Count

     When Failure Is an Option
    Wed Jul 31 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Although we can take inspiration from stories where "failure is not an option," engineers think a lot about situations in which it very much is an option. Certainly in the world of computers, failure is never far away, and consequently there is some interesting vocabulary around anticipating and managing that failure.
78 79 80 81 82 Displaying 791-800 of 3488 Results