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  1. Blog Excerpts

     The "Cupertino Effect" and Other Tech Neologisms
    Fri Apr 19 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Promoting a new book entitled Netymology: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World, British author Tom Chatfield has been making the rounds talking about peculiar tech coinages, from "the Cupertino effect" to "approximeetings."

  2. Word Count

     Its Time: That Ol' Apostrophe Again
    Thu Apr 18 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Of the many small errors that bedevil many writers — and enrage their teachers and editors — there is perhaps none so simple to understand, and explain, than the use of "it's" when "its" is meant.

  3. Candlepower

     Shall We Plus?
    Wed Apr 17 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    "Plus" is a positive workhorse of a word. It can be a preposition (two plus two), an adjective (a C-plus grade), or a noun (the good weather is a plus). Until recently, though, "plus" has mostly stayed out of the verb column. That's changing, on the evidence of some recent sightings.

  4. Word Count

     Writing About Music
    Tue Apr 16 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." This enigmatic sentence has been bouncing around the literate world for thirty-plus years. Many attribute it to the cerebral comedian Martin Mull, but its origins, like those of many such catch phrases, remain misty.

  5. Word Count

     10 Non-Writing Activities That Will Improve Your Writing
    Mon Apr 15 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Just as making great music isn't always about being pitch-perfect (think of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), writing isn't always about, well, writing. In order to write, your mind needs to be both relaxed and fit. Having written a lot helps, of course, but here are 10 other activities you can do to better prepare yourself to write.

  6. Blog Excerpts

     A Taxing Day for Dictionaries
    Mon Apr 15 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    "Yes, April 15th is still the dreaded tax day," writes Mim Harrison. "But thanks to Samuel Johnson, it's also a great day for the English language and its wealth of wonderful words." That's because it is the date on which Johnson published his monumental dictionary of the English language in 1755. Read Harrison's look back at Johnson's Dictionary here.

  7. Word Routes

     Word on the Street: Sketchy Traffic Lingo
    Fri Apr 12 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    In my latest column for The Boston Globe, I observed that Beantown has more than its fair share of local terms for sketchy traffic maneuvers: the Boston left, the Boston bump, the Boston block, and so forth. But these regional labels can be found all over the country, and new ones keep cropping up.

  8. Blog Excerpts

     Scripps National Spelling Bee Adds Vocabulary Questions
    Thu Apr 11 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    In the wake of the Scripps National Spelling Bee's announcement Tuesday that vocabulary questions will now be included in the Bee, quiz yourself on sample questions here.

  9. Word Count

     A Strange Plural Phenomena
    Wed Apr 10 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Jonathon Owen is a copy editor and student of linguistics who "holds the paradoxical view that it's possible to be a prescriptivist and descriptivist simultaneously." Here, he looks at how people can get tripped up on words with unusual plural forms like phenomena.

  10. Word Count

     Grammar Behaving Badly
    Tue Apr 09 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    English teachers used to drill into students that they did not "feel good." They "felt well." It was the corollary to "I feel bad," not "I feel badly," to which many teachers would reply something like: "Well, maybe if you took off your gloves, you could feel better." "Good," "well," "bad," and "badly" all define how you feel, but not in the same way, grammatically.
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