Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2010
Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, writes:
We think of balance as a good thing, associating it with poise, equilibrium, evenness and harmony, as stability in unpredictable circumstances or as a healthy mix of disparate elements. It's a versatile metaphor. We try to balance our lives by living a balanced lifestyle, holding balanced views and following, on balance, a balanced diet. We balance work and play, overtime and downtime, business and pleasure. Mostly business: we balance our books, accounts, loans, budgets and balance sheets. Continue reading...
This Sunday's New York Times Magazine was a special issue on education, with a focus on education technology. I used the opportunity to write an On Language column that explored new theoretical approaches to language learning that are having important practical applications in the English-language classroom.
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The Baltimore Sun raised a ruckus among its readers by printing a certain four-letter word in a front-page headline on Tuesday. Here is the offending headline:
Limn (pronounced like "limb") means "trace the shape of," "make a portrait of," or simply "describe." It isn't a word you see every day in newspaper headlines, and that bothered some Baltimoreans. Continue reading...Opposing votes limn differences in race
Blog Excerpts
"Refudiate" and other Top Words of the Summer
As the summer vacation season draws to a close, we hear about a new entry in the "X-cation" trend from Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland who writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First.
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My latest On Language column for The New York Times digs into the currently popular words of instruction, "Man up!" How you interpret it has a lot to do with what exactly you think it means to be a man. As I write in the column, it can mean anything from "Don't be a sissy; toughen up" to "Do the right thing; be a mensch." But the up is just as important as the man, since it connects the expression to a family of imperatives of the "X up" variety, many having to do with accepting responsibility for one's actions.
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While reading the Aug. 19 Rolling Stone and trying to wrap my brain around Matt Taibbi's latest piece on our country's ongoing financial shenanigans, I stumbled onto an article on Katy Perry, who I know very little about due to my old age.
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