Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from March, 2014
With the teams competing in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament whittled down to the Final Four, "March Madness" is coming to a close. (Actually, as has been the case for a few decades now, March Madness extends into the beginning of April, when the semifinal and final games are played.) In honor of college hoops, I've selected a "Final Four" of important terms associated with the tournament.
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Announcements
"How Do You Get To College?" With Vocabulary.com
Vocabulary.com ignites a word learning frenzy at New York City school.
At a pep rally focused on academic achievement, about 500 students at New York City's High School for Public Service-Heroes of Tomorrow celebrated their Vocabulary.com monthly leaderboard win.
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Vocabulary.com News
Having associated the interjection boo with ghosts since childhood, it took me a while to get used to it as a term of endearment for one's (presumably living) significant other. However, it's been around long enough by now that some of you may well have grown up with it. But never mind boo: it's time to get ready for bae, the latest monosyllabic pet name starting with B.
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Vocabulary Shout-Out
"Aladdin" Jafar Styled for Broadway as "Epicene Menace"
A Disney villains one virtue may be teaching us the meaning of an unusual word
Reviewing Disney's new Broadway adaptation of Aladdin, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood describes Jonathan Freeman's Jafar as an "epicene menace." Let's take a look at what epicene through a picture of Jafar.
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Dept. of Word Lists
A Quick Current Events Quiz: Al Qaeda "Indoctrination" in Syria and More
Follow this news story and others from a vocabularian's perspective
Follow this week's news coverage from a vocabularian's perspective by learning 10 words from this week's New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage.
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Is it possible to take vocabulary expansion too far? In a piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Bernstein points out the situations where word-knowledge can work against you, making the point that "language junkies" might want to be careful lest they alienate people they're trying to impress, or just render themselves incomprehensible.
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Vocabulary
Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Word Tasting Note: "Varmint"
We all know what this: the fauna equivalent of a weed.
We all know what a varmint is, thanks to Yosemite Sam (and others). It's an annoying animal (or person), the fauna equivalent of a weed. It's something (or someone) who takes your nice, tidy set-up, your lovely garden or lawn or your livestock, and makes a mess of it. Before you had a good environment; now you have a nasty varmint.
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