Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2009
When I read in the New York Times recently that everyone is going quant in "the Age of Metrics," my first thought was, "Is that anything like Sarah Palin going rogue?" What's going on with these new ways of going, anyhow?
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The latest selection for 2009 Word of the Year comes from the good people at Merriam-Webster. Unlike other dictionary publishers that anoint an annual word, Merriam-Webster bases its winner and runners-up on actual user lookups to its online dictionary and thesaurus. So instead of the novelties selected by its competitors (distracted driving from Webster's New World, unfriend from New Oxford American), Merriam-Webster's choice is an old word that worked its way into current events: admonish.
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Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she looks at some pitfalls in using the word proscribe.
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The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its Word of the Year for 2009: it's unfriend, defined as "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook." Readers of this space will be quite familiar with the term, as I discussed it along with similar un-verbs on Word Routes in May and then again in September as a followup to my On Language column in the New York Times Magazine, "The Age of Undoing." It's nice to feel ahead of the curve on this one, but truth be told, unfriending has been going on for many years.
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University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron explains how a simple grammar lesson can lead to a clash of civilizations.
Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It's one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn't quite fit the way we're used to viewing things. Continue reading...
We welcome Ben H. Winters, who follows up the runaway success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with his own Jane Austen mashup, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. As the publisher, Quirk Books, explains, "Winters expands the original text of Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, swashbuckling pirates, and other seaworthy creatures." Hmm... octopi?
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Blog Excerpts
Collecting Collective Nouns
Twitter is becoming a great haven for wordplay. Check out the creativity on display in tweets marked with the hashtag #collectivenouns: "a knot of string theorists," "a sneer of critics," "a wunch of bankers," "a seemingly empty room of ninjas." The website All Sorts is collecting the results of this collective online experiment.
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