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  1. Evasive Maneuvers

     Honoring Hugh Rawson, Euphemism Scholar
    Tue Jul 02 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Lexicographer Hugh Rawson died recently. Among other accomplishments, he wrote Rawson's Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk, a monumental, essential look at euphemisms that every language-lover should own. I can't recommend it enough.

  2. Blog Excerpts

     Word on the Street: New Wall Street Journal Column
    Tue Jul 02 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, has been writing a language column for the last couple of years for The Boston Globe (and before that for The New York Times Magazine). Now he is starting a new language column for The Wall Street Journal called "Word on the Street." Each week he will focus on a word in the news and examine its history. In his first column, he looks at how cyber is showing up with increasing frequency as a noun. Check it out here.

  3. Language Lounge

     Happy Talk
    Mon Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    A news story that flitted across the headlines earlier this year reported on a study called "The Geography of Happiness," in which researchers in Vermont subjected 10 million geotagged tweets to sentiment analysis. Their object was to arrive at a metric for the relative happiness of people in a place. "The Geography of Happiness" breaks new ground in the analysis of digital-age linguistic data, while also raising interesting questions about the limits of obtaining reliable results from algorithm-driven research on big bags of words.

  4. Contest

     The Visual Thesaurus Crossword Puzzle: June Edition
    Fri Jun 28 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    It's that time of year where we're planning sunny vacations (or holidays, if you prefer). Figure out this vacation-themed crossword and you could win a Visual Thesaurus T-shirt!

  5. Word Routes

     Words in the Courtroom, from Mobspeak to "Argle-Bargle"
    Thu Jun 27 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    American courtrooms can produce some fascinating linguistic specimens. Two high-profile court cases have put language on display. In Boston, the trial of mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger has provided testimony full of old-school crime lingo. Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion on the Defense of Marriage Act featured some "legalistic argle-bargle."

  6. Teachers at Work

     Queue up, Sweets! Reflections on a Personal Vocabulary
    Wed Jun 26 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    "How long did you have to queue up?" I asked my brother about a concert he'd attended, just after I got back from a trip to the UK. "You're back in America now, Shannon," he teased me. "We don't queue up here, we line up!" He had a point, but I'd like to think my word choice was not merely the result of my Anglophile tendencies.

  7. Candlepower

     The Ads We Deserve
    Tue Jun 25 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Once upon a time, the verbs of advertising were need and want. Today you're more likely to hear a different verb. Poke around a bit, and you'll quickly discover that everyone — kids, young adults, teachers, you! — deserves "the best."

  8. Behind the Dictionary

     The Highest Dictionary in the Land? The Supreme Court and Definitions
    Mon Jun 24 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Judges, like the rest of us, turn to dictionaries when they're not sure about the meaning of a word. Or they turn to dictionaries when they're sure about a word's meaning, but they need some confirmation. Or they turn to a dictionary that defines a word the way they want it defined, rejecting as irrelevant, inadmissible, and immaterial any definitions they don't like.

  9. Blog Excerpts

     How "Tweet" Got in the OED
    Fri Jun 21 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    In the latest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary, one entry in particular has attracted attention: tweet, previously defined only as the chirping of birds, has been expanded to refer to 140-character Twitter updates as well. The OED loosened its usual "ten year rule" to let this newcomer in.

  10. Behind the Dictionary

     Teased and Spoiled
    Thu Jun 20 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Early trailers for movies are often teasers, which do little more than tell fans that some movie is in the works. But as the release date approaches, these trailers give away key moments of the plot and spoil the experience for many viewers. In earlier years, you teased people and spoiled things. But you can now tease things and spoil people. What happened?
81 82 83 84 85 Displaying 821-830 of 3488 Results