An oft-heard word of the Winter Olympics is
podium, the raised platform where medalists stand. As I wrote about recently for
The New York Times Magazine, during the Olympics
podium even gets used as a verb, as in "The Canadian alpine skiers failed to podium." The verbing of
podium bothers a lot of people, but the noun presents problems too. Away from the Olympics,
podium often gets conflated with another word,
lectern.
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The New York Times is a vocabulary-learning bonanza for students at all levels, employing a larger number of what teachers would call "vocabulary words" than any other American publication. And inside
The Times, every day, there's a bonanza within that bonanza, the succinct and telegraphic television listings page, whose capsule movie reviews employ more vocabulary — including words, terms and expressions — than any other page in the paper. And quite enjoyably, too.
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The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament has come to an end, and with it the end of Tyler Hinman's amazing five-year reign as champ. Meet the new alpha dog of the crossword world: the one and only Dan Feyer. Puzzlemaster Brendan Emmett Quigley joins us again with his wrap-up of the action from Brooklyn.
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It's time once again for the cream of the crosswording crop to converge on the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn, New York. Last year the nail-biting
final round saw Tyler Hinman emerge victorious for the fifth consecutive year (his thrilling first win was captured in the documentary
Wordplay). Will Tyler manage to pull off #6, or is it time for a new winner — like, say, last year's breakout star Dan Feyer?
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Earlier this month on Blog Excerpts we featured Alexandra D'Arcy's OUPblog post, "
Ode to a Prescriptivist," which drew a sharp dichotomy between linguistic descriptivism and prescriptivism (personified by D'Arcy and her stern grandmother, respectively). D'Arcy's post inspired Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, to write a typically thoughtful post on his blog,
Sentence First.
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Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing provides "bite-sized lessons to improve your writing" on her engaging blog The Writing Resource. Here Erin tackles the tricky distinction between
compose and
comprise.
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