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Articles about Language
"There are some old words," explains Arika Okrent on Mental Floss, "that are nearly obsolete but we still recognize because they were lucky enough to get stuck in set phrases that have lasted across the centuries." Okrent lists a dozen "lucky words that survived by getting fossilized in idioms."
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In my latest column for the Boston Globe, I look at the recent craze for "cronuts," which are a croissant-doughnut hybrid created by an upscale French bakery in Manhattan. It was such a hit that imitators have created their own hybrids using names like dossant or doissant. Regardless of these concoctions' culinary qualities, is cronut a more appealing name than other combinations of croissant and do(ugh)nut?
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Blog Excerpts
About Those Dialect Maps...
You might have seen a set of American English dialect maps making the rounds online after a Business Insider piece about the maps went viral. But where does all of that survey data come from? Our own Ben Zimmer has the story on Language Log — read his post here.
In my latest column for the Boston Globe, I take a look at the rapid rise of the slogan "Boston Strong" in the month since the Marathon bombing. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but it's only the latest in a long line of "strong" slogans.
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With Baz Luhrmann's movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby arriving in theaters, this week has been full of Gatsby talk. Online commentators have been writing about words coined or popularized by Fitzgerald, the slang of the 1920s "flapper" era, and even the name Gatsby itself.
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There are all sorts of words in English based on the -onym word part, which derives from a Greek word that means name. Everyone knows about homonyms and synonyms, but what about retronyms, demonyms, and aptonyms?
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Vocabulary Shout-Out to Jonathan Rauch for "Mesomorph"
A word to describe physique and also personality.
In writing about Harvard Medical School faculty member Dr. Angelo Volandes and the films he is making to help terminally-ill patients decide to opt out of medical intervention, The Atlantic contributing editor Jonathan Rauch uses mesomorph to describe Volandes' physical appearance.
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