For today's installment of Mailbag Friday, our question comes from VT subscriber Barry Francolino in Romania. (One of our many far-flung correspondents!) Barry writes, "Just interested to know where the word/phrase/idea pipe dream comes from." The definition given by the Visual Thesaurus, "a fantastic but vain hope (from fantasies induced by the opium pipe)," gives a whiff of its origin.  Continue reading...

Last Friday I was delighted to be a return guest on the Wisconsin Public Radio Show "At Issue with Ben Merens" (audio available here). Our ostensible topic was "words of the summer" (including skadoosh, of course!), but once we started taking calls from listeners, the floor was open to any topic of interest to word-savvy Wisconsinites. Much like what happened when I was on the show last December, conversation turned to perceived "gaps" in the English language that callers thought should be filled with new coinages. This time around, Robert from Coloma expressed dissatisfaction with the words boyfriend and girlfriend, suggesting a new word to cover both: inti-mate.  Continue reading...

If there's one word that captures the zeitgeist of our current economic downturn, it's subprime. The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Year for 2007, and as I described in my last column it is among the new entries in the latest updates of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. But it's a pretty odd word when you stop to think about it. The newly announced Merriam-Webster definition reads as follows: "having or being an interest rate that is higher than a prime rate and is extended especially to low-income borrowers." Wait a minute: a loan with a rate that is higher than prime is called sub-prime? How did that happen?  Continue reading...

Everybody knows about differences between American and British English like truck vs. lorry or elevator vs. lift. On her blog Separated by a Common Language, Lynne Murphy (an American linguist teaching in the UK) takes on subtler distinctions like proctor vs. invigilate or day care vs. crèche.

Dictionary publishers don't get too many opportunities for creating PR buzz, but one surefire way of getting some attention is to announce the new words (and new senses of old words) that have been added in the latest update to a particular dictionary. In the past few days there have been new-word announcements for two major dictionaries, one in the US and one in the UK: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (also in its 11th edition, coincidentally enough). Let's take a look at what they're adding.  Continue reading...

The other day, my two teenage sons cajoled me into watching a movie they both find tremendously amusing. The film is not new. It's called Kangaroo Jack, and features Christopher Walken playing a small-time thug named Sal. Although Sal is the head of a bumbling crime family, he feels very insecure about his word knowledge, and throughout the film he is seen making a desperate attempt at self-improvement through the use of a tape-recorded vocabulary tutorial. In my favorite scene, a soothing female voice on Sal's tape player defines the word amorphous — having no shape or form, and then directs Sal to use the word in a sentence. Sal responds with this beauty: "After Joey Clams got whacked, his head was amorphous."  Continue reading...