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Blog Excerpts
Words to Avoid in Business Writing
Mon Apr 08 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Last week, usage guru Bryan A. Garner collected a list of business-speak or "bizspeak" to avoid and posted it to the Harvard Business Review blog. What he describes as "vogueish" and "hyperformal" vocabulary makes an easy target.
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Blog Excerpts
Roger Ebert's Lexicon: Fruit Carts, Idiot Plots, and Wunza Movies
Fri Apr 05 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Legendary film critic Roger Ebert died yesterday after a protracted battle with cancer. He leaves behind a prodigious record of film commentary, but one of his most delightful efforts is his "Glossary of Movie Terms" for Roger Ebert's Video Companion (later expanded into Ebert's Little Movie Glossary). With help from readers, Ebert compiled a lexicon of the silliest movie clichés. Here's a sampling.
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Teachers at Work
Signs of Possessiveness: The Revenge of the Apostrophe
Thu Apr 04 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Worthies from the County of Devon in southwest England caused a bit of a ruckus recently when the local government announced that they were abandoning the use of the apostrophe on all street signs in the county. This, they claimed, was to avoid "the confusion" that they thought its retention would bring. What's more — or more inaccurately "whats more" — they said that this was merely a clarifiction of what had been common practice for a long time.
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Evasive Maneuvers
Slingin' Blue-Eyed American Slang
Wed Apr 03 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Over the past couple of years, I've done several columns on massive dictionaries that have been recently completed or published, like the Dictionary of American Regional English and Green's Dictionary of Slang. Unfortunately, not all lexicographical projects have such a happy ending.
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Word Count
Centering Around Logic
Tue Apr 02 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Some English speakers, copyeditors like myself among them, like logic. We like writing to be neat and tidy: precise words all lined up in their Sunday best, punctuation accentuating their meaning instead of overwhelming it. Which is why phrases like center around drive us crazy.
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Language Lounge
Forward March
Mon Apr 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013
The phrase going forward is impossible to avoid: it is beloved by politicians, journalists, and marketers. Going forward does, however, provide an opportunity to look at the many ways that English offers to unite "now" with what may lie ahead, and the ways in which fashions in usage, among other factors, influence how speakers and writers signal their expectations or wishes.
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Contest
The Visual Thesaurus Crossword Puzzle: March Edition
Fri Mar 29 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Spring has sprung, and we have some seasonally appropriate wordplay in this month's puzzle. Figure it out and you could win a Visual Thesaurus T-shirt!
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Blog Excerpts
Can Providence Narrow the "Word Gap"?
Thu Mar 28 00:00:00 EDT 2013
The city of Providence, RI is embarking on a bold initiative to narrow the "word gap": young children in families of lower socioeconomic status tend to hear fewer words in their home environment than higher-income counterparts, leading to inequalities in academic success when they enter school. Providence has won a $5 million grant to address this problem by means of a high-tech vocabulary intervention program, as our own Ben Zimmer writes in his latest Boston Globe column.
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Blog Excerpts
Whither The #Hashtag?
Wed Mar 27 00:00:00 EDT 2013
The hashtag, which was born on Twitter as a handy way to organize conversation, is now spreading to Facebook. But there's a #hashtag #backlash, too, with some wondering if the convention has outlived its usefulness.
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Blog Excerpts
Gosh-All-Potomac! 10 Great Minced Oaths
Tue Mar 26 00:00:00 EDT 2013
"Minced oaths," Arika Okrent of Mental Floss reminds us, are "creative substitutions" of taboo expressions, and English used to be full of them. Okrent lists ten entertaining ones, including "G. Rover Cripes!" and "Gosh-All-Potomac!" See the whole list here.
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