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Behind the Dictionary
True Facts and False Facts
Tue Jul 30 00:00:00 EDT 2013
When I was in elementary school, and was being taught the difference between fact and opinion, I wondered how to classify statements like "There are 51 states in the United States." It wasn't true, so it wasn't a fact, but on the other hand, it didn't seem to involve the kind of judgment that we were learning to identify with opinions.
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Word Count
What Makes It Right?
Mon Jul 29 00:00:00 EDT 2013
The long-running battle between descriptivists and prescriptivists involves many arguments about whether particular points of usage are right or wrong. Plenty of arguments boil down to "Just because everybody does it doesn't make it right!" I've occasionally asked, "So what would make it right?" but I've never received a real answer.
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Contest
The Visual Thesaurus Crossword Puzzle: July Edition
Fri Jul 26 00:00:00 EDT 2013
In this month's crossword, we have a quotation from a famous writer who was born on this day. Figure it out and you could win a Visual Thesaurus T-shirt!
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Blog Excerpts
A Twitload of Twitterisms
Thu Jul 25 00:00:00 EDT 2013
On TIME Newsfeed, Katy Steinmetz wonders why Twitter has inspired "an army of fusion words," or portmanteaus — from "Twiplomacy" (Twitter diplomacy) to "Twitterati" (Twitter literati). Our own Ben Zimmer has some ideas.
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Dog Eared
David Crystal's Brilliant Demystification of English Spelling
Wed Jul 24 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Much like the government, the English spelling system is a popular punching bag. People love to kvetch about its inconsistencies and exceptions, lamenting the near-impossible task of learning to spell.
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Teachers at Work
Fifteen Ways of Looking at "The Woods": Jumpstarting Poetry in the Classroom
Tue Jul 23 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Figuring out how to teach poetry is particularly troublesome, and may be ruining some poor teacher's time on the beach at this very moment. The threshold for frustration over poetry seems to be extremely low, indeed, judging from the groans and complaints from both sides of the teacher's desk.
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Edulinks
Give Your Brain a Workout with Sports Literacy
Mon Jul 22 14:00:00 EDT 2013
Use Alan Brown's Sports Literacy Blog to find creative ways to encourage jocks to read! On Alan's blog, you'll find lots of links to popular sports-related texts, organized by genre – e.g., baseball, football, cycling, and even rock climbing. Since the site's curator, Alan Brown, spent years as a high school teacher and as a basketball coach, he knows how to excite students about reading through sports stories.
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Candlepower
Taking Stock
Mon Jul 22 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Next month marks the 44th anniversary of the Woodstock festival, and we're still hearing its echoes. One of Woodstock's most enduring legacies is its influence on language. Wherever there's an "X-stock" festival, from Artstock in Oregon to Zoostock in Pennsylvania, from Rootstock in Santa Rosa, California, to Bloodstock in Derbyshire, UK, Woodstock lives on.
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Word Routes
A Whistlestop Tour of "Whistleblowers"
Fri Jul 19 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Edward Snowden's leaking of National Security Agency information has put the term whistleblower back in the news. Since the early 1970s, whistleblower has come to be seen as a positive term, but before that it had been decidedly negative for many decades.
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Blog Excerpts
How Do You Define "Troll"?
Thu Jul 18 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Claire Hardaker, a linguist at Lancaster University in the U.K., recently published a survey of "trolling," i.e., "behavior of being deliberately antagonistic or offensive via computer-mediated communication (CMC), typically for amusement's sake." In the wake of the media attention her work has received, Hardaker considers the varying definitions people have for the word "troll."
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