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Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which he nominated President Obama for re-election, has been hailed as a rhetorical tour de force. The press corps marveled at how Clinton used the prepared speech as a mere starting point, injecting his remarks with ad-libbed folksiness. The result was a speech that managed to elucidate wonky policy specifics in the homespun style of a Southern preacher.
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Can a simple slangy acronym mark a generation gap? YOLO, short for "You Only Live Once," has emerged as an age-based shibboleth: all too familiar to members of the millennial set, and all but meaningless to their elders. In my latest Boston Globe column, I dissect the YOLO phenomenon, but there's much more to say about those four letters.
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On WBUR's Cognoscenti blog, Jan Freeman (formerly the language columnist for the Boston Globe) writes: "In the 15 years I've been writing about the English language, I've learned a lot, but one question remains as baffling as ever: Why do people love their language peeves so dearly?" To find out her answer, click here.
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"My students have been saying it correctly all the time, and I've been telling them that they were wrong," said Maria de Conceição. She had her head in her hands and, while not looking exactly disheartened, she did look somewhat perplexed. She was one of twenty Portuguese teachers of English who were showing pluck and determination by sitting through a twenty-five hour training course with me, and we had been looking at the alarming variety of ways of saying many high-frequency words in English.
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What does a Hanseatic city have to do with America's most popular sandwich? How is the city of Mozart related to a ballpark favorite? And how did the names of these cities end up as common and productive English words? It's all because of Americans' love for an ethnic food that's so much a part of our diet that we might not even realize it's ethnic: namely, German cuisine.
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