Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2010
I have to admit, I'm still basking in the glow of last month's American Dialect Society meeting, when my two picks for 2009's Most Euphemistic — hiking the Appalachian trail and sea kittens — each took home an award. Hiking killed it in the euph category, while the sea kittens swam over to "Most Unnecessary" and took the prize. Booyah, and may I add, for the benefit of older readers, huzzah!
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My latest On Language column in the New York Times Magazine is all about "crash blossoms," a new term for a phenomenon that people have been noting for decades: newspaper headlines that can be read in unintended ways (like "British Left Waffles on Falklands"). I've already received a plethora of emails from readers who wanted to share crash blossoms that they've collected over the years.
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Yesterday we talked to seventh-grader Tony Incorvati of Canton Country Day School, who has competed in the Scripps National Spelling Bee for the last two years and is going for a three-peat. We asked Tony to share some of his favorite words. And try Tony's Community Spelling Bee for some more tough words!
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WunderkindA column for scrappy students
Spelling Whiz, Part Two: Tony Incorvati of Canton Country Day
A few months ago we interviewed sixth-grader Nicholas Rushlow of Pickerington, Ohio, who participated in the Scripps National Spelling Bee the last two years, placing 17th last spring. We were pleased to hear that another Ohio student, seventh-grader Tony Incorvati of Canton Country Day School, has also made it to the Nationals twice and, like Nicholas, has been using the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee to study for this year's bee season. We talked to Tony and his mother Nancy Incorvati about how they've been preparing.
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Franklin P. Adams, a regular at the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s and '30s, was a master of comic verse. His best-known work is no doubt "Baseball's Sad Lexicon," an ode to the Chicago Cubs double-play combination of "Tinker to Evers to Chance." The blog Futility Closet brings to our attention another playful ode by Adams that's right up our alley: "To a Thesaurus."
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Blog Excerpts
Sweet Tooth Fairies
Combine sweet tooth with tooth fairy and you get sweet tooth fairy. That's the premise for The Illustrated Sweet Tooth Fairy, a website that seeks to collect such whimsical fusions as magnetic personality disorder, periodic table manners, and emotional baggage carousel. Erin McKean describes the project in the Boston Globe here.
When google, a verb meaning "to search the Internet," was chosen by the American Dialect Society as Word of the Decade (2000-09), my ADS colleague Grant Barrett wondered whether Google's trademark lawyers might have preferred it if the runner-up, blog, had won instead. It is of course a tribute to the vast popularity of Google that it has become accepted as a generic verb for online searching, but the protectors of the trademark wouldn't necessarily see it that way. Meanwhile, Microsoft, creators of the rival search engine Bing, would very much like people to use their brand name as a verb.
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