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Vocab activities for your classroom
The Real News About the Redesigned SAT
April 16, 2014
By Georgia Scurletis
Topic : VocabularyWordshopVocab activities for your classroomThe Real News About the Redesigned SAT April 16, 2014 By Georgia Scurletis![]() Article Topics:Word CountWriters Talk About WritingStrangers in Our Midst: Words We Skip While Reading April 9, 2014 By Mike Pope
When I was studying Spanish and had gotten to the point where our assignments consisted of reading real books, I kept a well-thumbed dictionary on my desk. Every paragraph seemed to contain several words that I had to look up, which was tedious and slow. Our wise teacher kept telling us that we didn't need to do that—you don't actually have to know what every word means to understand the text.
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Article Topics:Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexiconA "Final Four" of March Madness Lingo March 31, 2014 By Ben Zimmer
With the teams competing in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament whittled down to the Final Four, "March Madness" is coming to a close. (Actually, as has been the case for a few decades now, March Madness extends into the beginning of April, when the semifinal and final games are played.) In honor of college hoops, I've selected a "Final Four" of important terms associated with the tournament.
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Is it possible to take vocabulary expansion too far? In a piece in the Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Bernstein points out the situations where word-knowledge can work against you, making the point that "language junkies" might want to be careful lest they alienate people they're trying to impress, or just render themselves incomprehensible.
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We all know what a varmint is, thanks to Yosemite Sam (and others). It's an annoying animal (or person), the fauna equivalent of a weed. It's something (or someone) who takes your nice, tidy set-up, your lovely garden or lawn or your livestock, and makes a mess of it. Before you had a good environment; now you have a nasty varmint.
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March is National Reading Month, and to commemorate the occasion, Time's Katy Steinmetz points to some great writing in small packages. She also checks in with our sister site, Vocabulary.com, for insights into vocabulary items in the texts she has chosen.
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Article Topics:Word CountWriters Talk About WritingThe Politics of Writing: Should You Use Skunked Terms? March 13, 2014 By Erin Brenner
Decimate. Literally. Hopefully. These words, and others like them, provoke so much ire in some readers that they become troublesome to use. Critics feel that the writer is using the word in an unauthorized way, that it's being using to mean what it does not mean.
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