Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from August, 2011
All this week, politicians and pundits have been busy reacting to Standard & Poor's downgrade of the U.S. debt rating from AAA to AA+, the first such credit downgrade in American history. The word downgrade itself has taken on powerful significance, to the point that it has vaulted into contention for Word of the Year.
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Earlier this week, we featured an excerpt from Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little by Christopher Johnson, a branding expert who runs the website The Name Inspector. Here we continue Johnson's discussion of how "the crowded space of names might create a need for more complex ways to create names."
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As it has done for the past couple of years, the New York Times analytics department has kept track of which words readers of the Times website click on the most to look up definitions. At the top of the leaderboard this year are such stumpers as panegyric, immiscible, and Manichean. How well do you know the thorniest Times vocab?
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Christopher Johnson, a branding expert who runs the website The Name Inspector, has a new book out called Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little about how contemporary message-makers need to become "verbal miniaturists." In this excerpt, Johnson explains how "neologisms can be among the most powerful of micromessages."
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Every technological advance brings with it new vocabulary, very often by taking old words and supplying new meanings. The age of social media has given us friending and unfriending, following and unfollowing, and so forth. Now Google's foray into social networking, Google+, has introduced its own lingo: circles and hangouts, sparks and huddles. But with such a new system (Google+ is still in limited field trial), there's naturally some initial confusion over basic terminology.
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A journalist friend on Twitter, Oliver, asked my opinion of ongoing. He said he had been asked to ban it in a style guide, and that he didn't see why. I said I had nothing against it, and that banning it struck me as excessive and unhelpful. Although I sometimes find constructions like ongoing situation and ongoing issue vague or euphemistic, I see no point in prohibiting them outright.
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English is not long on productive verb-creating affixes — things you can tack onto or tuck into words at will to make entirely new verbs and get away with it — so it's worth celebrating one of the few that have a proven track record: the suffix -ize. -Ize allows you to neologize when the occasion calls for it, in a way that very few other English affixes do.
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