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  1. Word Routes

     A Muggle's View of Potter-Speak
    Fri Jul 15 00:00:00 EDT 2011
    With the final Harry Potter movie opening this weekend, many are reflecting on the last legacy of J.K. Rowling's oeuvre. In print and on screen, the Harry Potter franchise has been incredibly successful, and it's only natural that such a mass phenomenon would leave its imprint on popular culture, including the popular lexicon. Rowling's inventive use of language has been a key to conjuring the fantasy world of the Potterverse, and that language has seeped into real-world usage as well.

  2. Word Count

     Word Tasting Note: "Funambulist"
    Mon Jun 18 00:00:00 EDT 2012
    When Nik Wallenda crossed over Niagara Falls on tightrope as a daredevil stunt, it was a golden opportunity for commentators to use the word funambulist.

  3. Word Routes

     Stay Tuned for Language Mavenry
    Fri Mar 19 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    It's been a whirlwind week since the official announcement that I would be taking over the "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, the old stomping grounds of the late lamented Language Maven, William Safire. I'm grateful for all of the warm messages of congratulation I've received, and I also remain cognizant that in taking over Safire's column, I have extremely big shoes to fill.

  4. Word Routes

     Presenting the Nominees for 2014 Word of the Year
    Fri Jan 09 00:00:00 EST 2015
    Greetings from Portland, Oregon, where the American Dialect Society is holding its annual conference. On Thursday, in my capacity as chair of the society's New Words Committee, I presided over the nominating session for various categories in our Word of the Year selection.

  5. Word Routes

     Tracking Down the Roots of a "Super" Word
    Mon Apr 23 00:00:00 EDT 2012
    Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. So many of us learned that outrageous mouthful of a word at an early age, when it was truly a verbal milestone to be able to pronounce it without getting tongue-tied. And just saying the word is an invitation to start singing the song from the classic 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins. But how did the word come to be? When I heard the news that one of the Mary Poppins songwriters passed away last month, I set about to answer that question, taking me down many unexpected alleyways of 20th-century popular culture.

  6. Behind the Dictionary

     A Few Choice Words
    Wed Dec 30 00:00:00 EST 2009
    We welcome back linguist Neal Whitman, who has noticed that many educators are fond of "choice" language, as in "He made good choices." Neal plumbs the history of this usage and talks to teachers and administrators about how the words "choose" and "choice" have shifted in recent years.

  7. Teachers at Work

     A Liar of Teachers: Unlocking Low-Frequency Vocabulary
    Tue Feb 15 00:00:00 EST 2011
    We welcome back Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugal and other European countries. Fitch considers how a fun exercise in concocting collective nouns could be used as a tool for vocabulary expansion.

  8. Word Routes

     Tracking Dialects on Twitter: What's Coo and What's Koo?
    Fri Nov 04 00:00:00 EDT 2011
    In last Sunday's New York Times, I wrote about how researchers are using Twitter to build huge linguistic datasets in order to answer all sorts of interesting analytical questions. Some are looking at the emotional responses of Libyans to unfolding events like the death of Qaddafi, while others are tracking the distribution of regional patterns in American English. This latter research area, Twitter dialectology, is just getting off the ground, but the results are already quite intriguing.

  9. Behind the Dictionary

     And the Word of the Year is...
    Mon Jan 07 00:00:00 EST 2008
    So what exactly makes a word the Word of the Year? The Visual Thesaurus traveled to the American Dialect Society's annual meeting in Chicago last week to find out. For the past eighteen years this scholarly group has been selecting words or phrases that have become newly prominent or notable in American English. Their goal is to demonstrate that change in language is normal, nonstop -- and even fun.

  10. Word Routes

     Of Showdowns, Throwdowns, and Hoedowns
    Mon Jul 28 00:00:00 EDT 2008
    Last week we featured a debate over contemporary usage of whom, with Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre squaring off against Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky. To be honest, the exchange was a bit too civil and reasonable to live up to its billing as a "usage showdown" — at least based on the Visual Thesaurus definition of showdown as "a hostile disagreement face-to-face." I was amused to see that on his copy-editing blog, "You Don't Say," John McIntyre facetiously referred to the debate with an even more inappropriate term: smackdown, which most people (in the U.S. at least) would associate with professional wrestling. Other violent confrontations ending in -down include beatdown and throwdown. And where do hoedowns fit into all of this?
7 8 9 10 11 Displaying 81-90 of 103 Results