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Blog Excerpts

Not One-Off Britishisms

Last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Delaware English professor Ben Yagoda wrote about the clunky prose style he noticed in his students' compositions, including "a boom in Britishisms." Now Yagoda has created a wiki page to keep track of Britishisms creeping into American usage. Here is what Yagoda has collected so far.  Continue reading...
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In this special edition of Evasive Maneuvers, our euphemism-meister Mark Peters reviews a new book on verbal evasions, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms by Ralph Keyes. According to Keyes, euphemisms serve as "an excellent way to determine what we find embarrassing."  Continue reading...
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Tuesday night's State of the Union address by President Obama provided a fresh round of political phrase-making. As members of Congress went on a bipartisan date night, Obama called for investments to win the future and meet our Sputnik moment by doing big things. Here's a look at some of the memorable words and phrases that came out of the speech.  Continue reading...
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The College Board abandoned the analogy as a SAT vocabulary question type in 2005. Those of us who remember taking SAT-style analogies are either nostalgic for the short word puzzles or are still traumatized by the sight of those tricky pairs of words mysteriously situated between single and double colons.  Continue reading...
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In this week's worksheet, students can use the relationship lines in the Visual Thesaurus word map displays to answer analogy questions.  Continue reading...
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AT&T wants you to believe that corporations are people, just like you and me, and that just like us, they have a constitutional right to privacy. To prove it, AT&T says, just look at the law and the dictionary.  Continue reading...
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Blog Excerpts

Conan's "Thrice" Campaign

Late-night talk-show host Conan O'Brien doesn't see why new words like chillax and frienemy should be added to the Oxford English Dictionary when useful old words like thrice have fallen out of favor. Watch Conan's campaign to get people using thrice again here.
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