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Following a Wall Street Journal article poking gentle fun at a movement to strike overused words such as good, bad, and nice from student writing, Slate Senior Editor Gabriel Roth warned that a "reasonable pedagogical technique" had morphed into "perverse and deadly totalitarianism." For middle school English teachers, we suggest some middle ground. Continue reading...

In 1948, the American journalist and language chronicler H.L. Mencken wrote an essay for The New Yorker, "Video Verbiage," in which he analyzed the lingo of the fledgling medium of television. Several of the words he gathered are now obsolete: vaudeo ("televised vaudeville"), televiewers (now just "viewers"), blizzard head (an actress so blonde that the lighting has to be toned down). Others are with us still, including telegenic and telecast. Nearly 70 years after Mencken published his essay, television itself is undergoing a massive redefinition, and so is our TV lexicon. Continue reading...

A few days after high school senior Katelyn "Lyn" Leech posted a list she'd created from the Broadway hit Hamilton using the Vocabulary.com list builder, her Twitter notifications went through the roof. She knew something was up, but it wasn't until she logged on that she saw what it was. Hamilton creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) had tweeted Lyn's list to his large following. Continue reading...

Language arts teacher Erin Vanek created a quick, clever vocab-based guessing game to spark her students' curiosity about a book she was about to assign. The result: students who are curious about the story and familiar with some of the key terms they'll see when they read. Continue reading...

I heard an interview on the radio the other day with Dan Price, CEO of Seattle-based credit card processing firm Gravity Payments. He's been in the news because of his decision to set the minimum salary for his employees at $70,000. What interested me in the interview was his use of pencil out, a phrasal verb that was new to me. Lexicographers are to words like birders are to birds: when we spot one that's not on our life list we get very excited, even as others' eyes may glaze over. Continue reading...

Hey guys, I wrote a book. Fittingly, I can only state its title euphemistically in this column about euphemisms. It's sorta called Bull*#@$: A Lexicon. Not being able to name my book could be construed as an obstacle in my quest to use this column for shameless self-promotion. Or is it? Continue reading...

This is the time of year where we revel in tradition, participating in rituals and using language that takes us "home for the holidays" whether we're physically traveling or not. But it's also a time to examine those traditions. Here, we put together some holiday-inspired columns and vocabulary lists that help us understand the origins of holiday language old and new. Continue reading...

Lin-Manuel Miranda's mega-hit Broadway musical Hamilton is all about upending expectations. From its casting of actors of all races to play the all-white founding fathers, to its rap-heavy score, to its percussive style of storytelling, Hamilton turns traditions upside down, including traditions involving words. Continue reading...

The latest episode of Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley is a hoot and a half, as I take a look at the origins of hootenanny, a word that emerged from rural America with many meanings before finding fame as a name for folk-music gatherings. Continue reading...