One of the most persistent myths about word acquisition is that students don't need to be taught words; they just need to read more and their vocabularies will magically expand. This theory — which I like to call "learning words by osmosis" — doesn't hold much promise for your average or struggling reader. While it may hold true for a select group of students who are strong, avid readers possessing a curiosity about words, most students don't learn words by simply encountering them in reading.
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What, Exactly, is U.N.C.L.E.?
Besides a top secret multinational spy agency...it's a backronym. Which means it's right on trend.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which appears this weekend in all its thrilling spy story glory, might leave the non-nindoctrinated among us wondering: What does U.N.C.L.E. stand for? And why did the show's creators select that particular word?
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When English-language Scrabble champ Nigel Richards, who does not speak French, won a French-language Scrabble championship, analysts rushed to analyze how much memorization that actually entailed. Ben Zimmer explains that to get a full understanding of Richards' achievement, a simple counting of words in the dictionary only gives a partial picture.
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Happy Fourth! It's time for fireworks, picnics, swimming excursions, ice cream cones...and word learning!
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It's time once again for the nationally televised semifinals and finals of The Scripps National Spelling Bee! As in past years, our own Ben Zimmer will be live-tweeting the competition from the @VocabularyCom Twitter account and reporting on the results here in his Word Routes column.
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Following the enormously successful release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Slate's words correspondent Katy Waldman raised a question, "Why are they called the Avengers? What are they avenging?" This put us in mind of lexicographer Neal Whitman's observation a few years back that, at least in movies, "Avenging and vengeance are for good guys, while revenge is for the bad guys."
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Unless you're a resident of the Lego Movie's Bricksburg where "Everything is Awesome," you may have noticed that awesome is...well...not quite as awesome as it used to be. In fact, says Tim Askew, writing for Inc., awesome has become so overused, it's "inescapable, like verbal kudzu choking out the variegated richness of the English language."
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