Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2015
Our To Kill a Mockingbird interactive word lists are among our most popular. But there's another kind of vocabulary you'll find in To Kill a Mockingbird: Southern-inflected words that testify to the more-defined regional nature of American English as it was spoken three quarters of a century ago. And with the news that Harper Lee will release a recently rediscovered novel written previous to To Kill a Mockingbird, we can only hope to find a rich store of Southern-inflected words there as well.
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Turns out the American Dialect Society callously disregarded my selection of conscious uncoupling (Gwyneth Paltrow's cuckoo-bananas term for divorce) for Euphemism of the Year. Instead, these linguists, lexicographers, word mavens, and rogue wordanistas selected EIT: an abbreviation of enhanced interrogation techniques, which is a euphemism of a euphemism.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
For Black History Month, Teach #blacklivesmatter
A free lesson plan built around student engagement
In January, the American Dialect Society made history by selecting a hashtag, #blacklivesmatter, as its Word of the Year. The choice inspired composition professors at St. John's University in Queens, Professor Sophie Bell and Professor Amanda Moulder to create a lesson plan around the ADS's #blacklivesmatter selection, bringing attention to race and language in a way that feels relevant to students' lives. To kick off Black History Month, we're sharing the lesson plan they created.
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Topics:
Teaching
Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Get a Fresh Start Every Month in Our Vocab Bowl
And encourage your kids to reach for an attainable goal.
What's the best way to start the month of February? With one teacher's inspiration to her students competing in the Vocabulary Bowl.
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Topics:
Vocabulary Bowl
Blog Excerpts
A Junior Dictionary Kerfuffle
"The lexicographic kerfuffle, thank goodness, isn't dead," writes Stefan Fatsis in The New Yorker. Fatsis is referring to the recent controversy over the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which has substituted all-natural words like "almond," "blackberry," and "minnow," with such 21st-century fare as "blog," "chatroom," and "database." Some noted writers have said they are "profoundly alarmed" by the changes. Read all about it here.
Vocabulary Shout-Out
For "The Americans" Season Opener, Get Your "Tradecraft" On
This insider's word for spy work is increasingly popular and well known
In a review of FX's Cold War-era thriller "The Americans," which begins its third season tonight, New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley expects her readers to know what she means by the term tradecraft. Though many believe this to be a term invented by John le Carré, it's been in use by spies since the 1950s at least.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
East Coast residents (outside of New England) might have been a bit underwhelmed by the blizzard-that-wasn't known as "Winter Storm Juno." While this "junior" storm has fallen short of the hyped-up expectations, it's still interesting to consider how it achieved named status in the first place.
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