With Baz Luhrmann's movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby arriving in theaters, this week has been full of Gatsby talk. Online commentators have been writing about words coined or popularized by Fitzgerald, the slang of the 1920s "flapper" era, and even the name Gatsby itself.Continue reading...
In an essay on writing in last week's The New Yorker, John McPhee describes drawing boxes around "perfectly O.K." words in a search for the "mot juste." Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf tells us words are a messy tangle that will always elude our best efforts to tie them down.Continue reading...
In a first look at Vocabulary.com, high school English teacher and blogger Lee Ann Spillane calls the site "the first tool I've seen that contextualizes vocabulary in ways similar to what we do in class."Continue reading...
Promoting a new book entitled Netymology: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World, British author Tom Chatfield has been making the rounds talking about peculiar tech coinages, from "the Cupertino effect" to "approximeetings."Continue reading...
In the wake of the Scripps National Spelling Bee's announcement Tuesday that vocabulary questions will now be included in the Bee, quiz yourself on sample questions here.Continue reading...
Last week, usage guru Bryan A. Garner collected a list of business-speak or "bizspeak" to avoid and posted it to the Harvard Business Review blog. What he describes as "vogueish" and "hyperformal" vocabulary makes an easy target.Continue reading...
Bloomberg Businessweek.com offers regular tips to SAT learners from Vivian Kerr of Veritas Test Prep, including a recent roundup of strategies for vocabulary learning. Here we take a look at determining if words are "charged" with positive or negative connotations.Continue reading...