As it has done for the past couple of years, the New York Times analytics department has kept track of which words readers of the Times website click on the most to look up definitions. At the top of the leaderboard this year are such stumpers as panegyric, immiscible, and Manichean. How well do you know the thorniest Times vocab?Continue reading...
The BBC Magazine ran a piece by Matthew Engel last week entitled, "Why do some Americanisms irritate people?" The Beeb then asked its readers to single out the American expressions they most despise, and in a followup gathered the top 50 peeves. The reader query generated a huge response -- 1,295 comments were posted before the BBC closed down the comment section -- but the most entertaining and incisive reactions came from language bloggers.Continue reading...
On his site Wordorigins.org, David Wilton has started a series of posts on "words first used in English for a particular year," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In his first post, he begins with the year 1911. Did you know that air force, floozy, lettergram, mozzarella, and taxi were all first documented a century ago? Read Wilton's post here.
On her Fritinancy blog, Visual Thesaurus contributor Nancy Friedman examines some of the words and phrases that have emerged in the coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden, including Abbottabad, double tap, triumphalism, and halo effect. Read her post here.
Stan Carey, one of our regular contributors, has a detailed post on his Sentence First blog about different from, than, and to. Though the than and to variants are often considered incorrect, Stan argues that these are simply dialectal differences. Read the whole thing here.
Ever wonder how the food terms macaroon, macaron and macaroni are related? It turns out that all three are "rooted in the great meetings of the Islamic and Christian culinary traditions in the Middle Ages." Read all about it on The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky's wonderfully nuanced blog, here.
Recently on Slate, University of Delaware English professor Ben Yagoda tackled "the 'nonplussed' problem": How long should we cling to a word's original meaning? (Nonplussed, for instance, has changed its meaning for many people from "perplexed" to "unfazed.")Continue reading...