Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Fun
Earlier this week we spoke to Stephen Dodson, co-author of Uglier than a Monkey's Armpit, a compendium of curses and insults from around the world. By way of introduction to this lively and engaging book, here is a (lightly expurgated!) letter to readers from Stephen, musing on the boundless creativity of the "gems of abuse" he has collected.
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Want to insult someone in Japanese? Try misokakku ('scum of soya paste'). In Polish, try motyla noga ('butterfly's leg'), and in Turkish, muhallebi çocuğu ('child of pudding'). These and hundreds of other colorful put-downs from around the world can be found in the delightful new book, Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit by Stephen Dodson and Dr. Robert Vanderplank. We spoke about the book with Dodson, known to many language lovers by his nom de blog, Languagehat.
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Earlier this week in the Book Nook section of our Educators page, we featured an excerpt from Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher's Learning Words Inside and Out, all about how teachers can use mnemonics to help students commit words to memory. Some of these memory aids are extremely well-known: most everyone knows Roy G. Biv spells out the initial letters of the seven colors in the spectrum, for instance. But there's an endless number of other mnemonic devices that get passed down from generation to generation, covering just about every field of human endeavor.
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Last week, in part one of our interview with author Paul Dickson, we talked about the work that went into the new edition of his Dickson Baseball Dictionary — a thousand-page monument to baseball's bottomless linguistic riches. Now in part two, Dickson discusses the diverse influences on the language of baseball, and how the sport has become a metaphorical source in politics and elsewhere.
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We've been talking to Paul Dickson about the new edition of his magnum opus, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. Now, in honor of Major League Baseball's 80th All-Star Game, played tonight at Busch Stadium in Saint Louis, we present some all-star words from Dickson's dictionary.
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As Major League Baseball heads into the All-Star break, we're taking advantage of the mid-season breather to think about the rich language of baseball. We talked to Paul Dickson, the sport's great lexicographer, about the monumental Dickson Baseball Dictionary. Recently published in its third edition, the dictionary has grown into a thousand-page tome of unprecedented breadth and scope. In the first part of our two-part interview, Dickson explains how his dictionary encompasses the whole history of baseball, from the early days of "protoball" to the latest statistical advances.
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Blog Excerpts
Wordgeddon!
Why say "blizzard" when you could say "snow-mageddon"? And why refer to the "swine flu outbreak" when you could say "a-pork-alypse"? Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters considers some catastrophic coinages in his latest column for Good.
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