When the American Dialect Society selected app as the 2010 Word of the Year, it was a nod to the tech term's sudden ubiquity over the past year or two. And now it's more contested than ever with Apple locked in litigation with two rivals, Microsoft and Amazon, in an attempt to hold on to a trademark for app store. How did we get to the point where, as the Apple slogan goes, "there's an app for that" (regardless of whose store you buy it from)? Continue reading...
Earlier this week, we featured an excerpt from Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little by Christopher Johnson, a branding expert who runs the website The Name Inspector. Here we continue Johnson's discussion of how "the crowded space of names might create a need for more complex ways to create names." Continue reading...
Words step outside of their borders all the time; and once they are in new territory, they rarely follow the rules that bound them in their original context. As time passes, they can become complete strangers to their original users, and may even be seen as betraying them. Continue reading...
Kitty. Tron. Legit. All these words appeared in the 2011 edition of the yearbook I sponsor. Students used these as slang; all three were used to describe something cool. Aside from legit, which seems to have been around for a while, I'm not sure the other two stuck. Continue reading...
My wife and I were out Christmas shopping last week and came home with an armload of classic holiday DVDs that we somehow didn't already own. She'd gathered up every title you probably know, and we spent a couple of evenings watching our way through the pile. During this latter-day review of the holiday favorites of our childhood, it struck me that there were a surprising number of terms and phrases that had become familiar either directly from these Christmas classics or from their sources. Continue reading...
What happens when nouns turn into verbs, and how can language arts educators use these "verbings" as teachable moments? Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, takes a look at this "trending" topic. Continue reading...
In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers helps readers to distinguish between words ending in the suffix "-ish" and other types of "-ish" words. Ebbers then provides teachers with some creative suggestions for introducing students to the suffix "-ish." Continue reading...
In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers provides teachers with some creative suggestions for showing students how to make the most of adjectives, "those fabulous descriptors that comprise about one-fourth of the words in the language." Continue reading...
It's one of the enduring cross-cultural culinary conundrums: Why are packaged potato snacks called chips in the US and crisps in the UK? The answer is equal parts history, legend, and marketing savvy. And the spudscape is getting more complicated as cultural boundaries dissolve and the snack-food industry grows more creative and prolific. Continue reading...
Hi! Hey! Ho! Yo! Ahem. Good day, ladies and gentlemen, umm, I'd like to address you today about the silly little words that we, umm, use without knowing if they're words or not: words like hey, hi, ho, yo, ahem, and umm. Here's hoping you don't find the topic ho-hum. (Oy, is anyone out there listening?) Continue reading...