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Blog Excerpts
When Words Get Fossilized
Wed Jun 19 00:00:00 EDT 2013
"There are some old words," explains Arika Okrent on Mental Floss, "that are nearly obsolete but we still recognize because they were lucky enough to get stuck in set phrases that have lasted across the centuries." Okrent lists a dozen "lucky words that survived by getting fossilized in idioms."
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Word Count
Letter Perfect: Why English is So Hard
Tue Jun 18 00:00:00 EDT 2013
The cashier at the fancy foods store was from Bosnia. "I have so much hard time with English," she said. "Why when you add one letter does whole word change?" She had asked the customer if she had a "dim," and the customer was flummoxed.
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Teachers at Work
Turning the Page: Short Fiction for English Language Learners
Mon Jun 17 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Getting to grips with stories in the EFL environment is more than simply dealing with problematic vocabulary. It's all to do with context, and how words work together to form a greater whole. Finding the right trigger means students being able to exceed the "normal" lexical load.
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Word Routes
Would You Prefer a "Cronut" or a "Dossant"?
Fri Jun 14 00:00:00 EDT 2013
In my latest column for the Boston Globe, I look at the recent craze for "cronuts," which are a croissant-doughnut hybrid created by an upscale French bakery in Manhattan. It was such a hit that imitators have created their own hybrids using names like dossant or doissant. Regardless of these concoctions' culinary qualities, is cronut a more appealing name than other combinations of croissant and do(ugh)nut?
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Word Count
How Copy Editors Are Killing Restrictive "Which"
Thu Jun 13 00:00:00 EDT 2013
The distinction between that and which is a favorite among usage writers. It's an interesting usage item for several reasons: first, it is an invention that was first proposed in the early 1800s yet didn't catch on until the 1900s; second, it's primarily, though not exclusively, an American distinction; and third, it has been very successful in print, though I think a good portion of its success is attributable to copy editors.
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Word Count
Why You Should Be a Copycat
Wed Jun 12 00:00:00 EDT 2013
If you'd been able to sneak into my home office on a recent Wednesday at 6:15 a.m., you would have found me hunched over my computer, copying text from the book Spunk & Bite by Arthur Plotnik. Why was I doing that? At that time of day?
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Dog Eared
"How to Not Write Bad" Is Not Bad at All
Tue Jun 11 00:00:00 EDT 2013
How to Not Write Bad — by the prolific Ben Yagoda — is an original, amusing, practical take on the writing self-help book. Yagoda points out that most writing book are about writing well, then makes the refreshing observation that writing well is beyond most people.
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Word Count
Killing the Zombies: "Between" and "Since"
Mon Jun 10 00:00:00 EDT 2013
In 2005, Arnold Zwicky introduced the term zombie rule to describe a grammar rule that isn't really a rule. Zombie rules are taught, followed, and passed along as rules we must follow to speak and write correctly. Like their namesakes, however, these rules are dead and no matter how many times it's explained that there is no grammatical basis for them, they just keep coming back.
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Word Routes
How "Emo" Got Political
Fri Jun 07 00:00:00 EDT 2013
When Fox News host Megyn Kelly gamely took on Erick Erickson, a contributor to the network, for his provocative statements about gender roles last week, she was puzzled by one word in particular that Erickson had used to describe his ideological opponents. "I don't know what the word is... some sort of liberals, eco-liberals, what did you call them?" "Emo liberals," Erickson clarified.
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Blog Excerpts
About Those Dialect Maps...
Fri Jun 07 00:00:00 EDT 2013
You might have seen a set of American English dialect maps making the rounds online after a Business Insider piece about the maps went viral. But where does all of that survey data come from? Our own Ben Zimmer has the story on Language Log — read his post here.
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