We recently spoke to Alex Rappaport and Blake Harrison, founders of the innovative educational company Flocabulary, about how they were inspired to infuse challenging vocabulary and educational content into rap music. In this interview you'll learn more about why they feel rap music is the perfect medium for their mission... and you'll get to sample one of their flocabulous videos.  Continue reading...

Merrill Perlman explains why journalists should appreciate the special connotations of seemingly synonymous words.  Continue reading...

Have you noticed how the word awesome once meant "awe-inspiring" or "extraordinarily good," but now just means, well, "good"? It's a case of semantic inflation, according to The Economist's Robert Lane Greene. Read his fascinating exploration of the word's plunge into mediocrity in Intelligent Life magazine here.

To be called a nerd these days isn't such a bad thing -- it can even be a statement of pride, a way of owning up to an all-consuming passionate interest, particularly in something technological or pop-cultural (or both). It has been reclaimed as a positive label in much the same way as geek has. The cartoonish '80s movie The Revenge of the Nerds turned out to have some prescience, as nerdy types from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have come to rule so much of 21st-century life. So it's only natural to wonder, where did the word nerd come from?  Continue reading...

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 happened ten years ago, and although everybody remembers what they were doing at that flashbulb moment, and many aspects of our lives were changed by those attacks, from traveling to shopping to going online, one thing stands out: the only significant impact that 9/11 has had on the English language is 9/11 itself.  Continue reading...

In a speech on Tuesday anticipating the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that it was time to retire the name "Ground Zero" when referring to the World Trade Center site. "We will never forget the devastation of the area that came to be known as 'Ground Zero,'" Bloomberg said. "But the time has come to call those 16 acres what they are: The World Trade Center and the National September 11th Memorial and Museum." That's quite a mouthful.  Continue reading...