Articles from March, 2012

Take on Ten Words from Today's NY Times - Mar. 27, 2012.

Then see Vocabulary Begets Vocabulary: The More You Know, the More You Learn to understand why learning these words will help you absorb even more as you read.

Is fritter a delicious fried pastry? Or what you did when you spent your inheritance on Botox and truffles? If contemporary means “belonging to the present time,” how come you can’t use it interchangeably with current, as in “Change the channel––the contemporary show is boring as all get out”?

Learn fritter, contemporary, and nine other context-sensitive words in a new list in the Test Prep category, Words You Need to See in the Wild.

When, in a CNN interview, Mitt Romney's senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom was asked about the possibility of Romney's recent conservative positions alienating independent voters in a general election, and Fehrnstrom said, "It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again," he was using a very powerful (and dangerous) tool: a simile.

See the Vocabulary.com Dictionary page for simile to review what a simile is, where it comes from, and what distinguishes one from a metaphor.