Topic : Usage
"Furlough." "Brinkmanship." "Shutdown." "Slimdown." The political stalemate on Capitol Hill about the federal budget and the Affordable Care Act has generated its own lexicon. Katy Steinmetz has compiled a helpful guide to shutdown buzzwords for TIME's Swampland blog — check it out here.
Evasive ManeuversEuphemisms old and new"Big Foreign Policy Initiative": What Is It Good For? October 2, 2013 By Mark Peters
Just as a biologist can tell a critter from a creepy-crawly by the number of legs, euphemism enthusiasts can tell a 5-alarm, major-league, restaurant-quality euphemism by the presence of three words. Readers of previous columns may remember terms such as employee dialogue session, strategic dynamism effort, enhanced pension offer, life problem issue, taco meat filling, and customer pain point. Every time, three words = three metric tons of malarkey.
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About LanguageCore Values: The Evolution of "Hardcore" Usage September 30, 2013 By Neal Whitman
The word hardcore has been getting more powerful in English for the past 80 years or so. What started as a way of describing the persistently unemployed has expanded into the domains of politics, music, and video games, not to mention general usage.
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Article Topics:Word CountWriters Talk About WritingBack to (the) School(s): Definitive Rules for the Definite Article September 19, 2013 By Erin Brenner
It's September and students of all ages are heading back to school. But why is it back to school and not back to the school or back to schools? Certainly if I were to write about one specific school, I would write the school. If I were talking about schools as a category, I can say schools.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexiconOf Pinpricks and Slam-Dunks: The Rhetoric of the Syrian Conflict September 13, 2013 By Ben Zimmer
The situation in Syria has revived a number of well-worn foreign-policy phrases, from "boots on the ground" to "slam-dunks" and "smoking guns." As the American response to the conflict has involved far more in the way of words than deeds, it's worth taking a closer look at the words used by officials and commentators, no matter how hackneyed.
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Evasive ManeuversEuphemisms old and newA Post-Health Trip to Belize September 4, 2013 By Mark Peters
In his latest monthly batch of under-the-radar euphemisms, Mark Peters illuminates why the care of "post-health professionals" might be necessary after someone is sent on a "trip to Belize."
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Premium is a versatile word that occupies a unique semantic space in English, with nodes corresponding to ideas of scarcity, superior quality, preference, payment, and reward. The ways in which the usage of premium has changed in the last century or so have given premium a kind of circuit-training workout, allowing it to exercise its meanings vigorously at each of these nodes at different times.
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