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.
In 2000, the American Dialect Society picked the Word of the Millennium: she, which entered English in the 12th century. But where did the word come from, exactly? Visual Thesaurus contributor Stan Carey writes on his Sentence First blog that its origins remain shrouded in mystery. Read all about it here.
The latest movie installment of C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia" is in the theaters, and Jeremy Marshall, a researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary, celebrates by digging into Narnia's fantastic world of dryads, boggles, and orknies. Read Marshall's post on OUPblog here.
Still mulling over Sarah Palin's use of the word refudiate? Check out these two commentaries. In his Good magazine column, Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters uses Refudiate-gate as an opportunity for a "Sarah Palin retrospective" here. And Geoff Nunberg argues on NPR's "Fresh Air" that the reactions to Palin's gaffe were more telling than the gaffe itself, here.
As its "Cool News of the Day," Reveries Magazine has featured the latest New York Times "On Language" column by Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer on "the iteracy afflicting Facebook, Google and others." Read more here (and read here for a previous "Cool News of the Day" tied to Zimmer's column on etymythology).
As it did last year, The New York Times has tabulated the words that readers of the Times website click on the most to look up definitions. This year's leaders include inchoate, profligacy, sui generis, and austerity. Read all about it on the "After Deadline" blog here.