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Words have meaning, right? Sure they do, we all know that! We certainly use words, spoken or written, at all hours of the day and night to convey what we mean to other people. We know the meanings of many words, and if we don't know what a word means -- heterolysis, for instance -- we can look up its meaning in the dictionary: "the destruction of cells of one species by enzymes derived from cells of a different species."
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At England's Ledbury Poetry Festival, poets were asked to single out "the expressions that have become such cliches that they have lost all meaning." Their responses range from "think outside the box" to "I am a very spiritual person." Read the cliches they selected, with commentary, at The Guardian here.
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If you were watching "This Week with Christiane Amanpour" on ABC Sunday morning, you saw a high-minded historical discussion of the U.S. Constitution. But you also might have caught an unusual media moment, when Amanpour, responding to Harvard University professor Jill Lepore, commented that Ben Franklin "was amazingly perspicacious when this Constitution was signed." As Amanpour spoke, a graphic popped up on the screen giving a dictionary definition for the word perspicacious.
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On the 4th of July, there's no better time to dig into the origins of the term "hot dog." Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer recently took a look at the earliest known evidence for "hot dog" from Paterson, New Jersey. You can read his Word Routes column on the subject here, and you can hear him talking about the latest research today on NPR's Morning Edition.
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