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Meet the "Turducken"
The Oxford Dictionary of English has announced the addition of more than 2,000 new terms. Meet the turducken ("a roast dish consisting of a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey") and other new entries in the official announcement from Oxford here, and in dictionary editor Catherine Soanes' interview with National Public Radio here.
Once again award-winning writer and educator Bob Greenman takes us on a journey through words selected from More Words That Make a Difference, a delightful book illustrating word usage with passages from the Atlantic Monthly.
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A new exhibit at the British Library on the evolution of English will feature some linguistic play that presages the age of "text-speak." As reported by The Guardian, the exhibit will display a comic poem printed in 1867 with lines like "I wrote 2 U B 4" ("I wrote to you before"). I've investigated this proto-text-speak and have found similar versified examples going all the way back to 1828.
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Ever since I wrote an On Language column for the New York Times Magazine about the authenticity of the dialogue on the AMC series "Mad Men," my inbox has been full of questions about words and phrases that have appeared on the show. The most recent episode, set in early 1965, was particularly rich in expressions that set off people's linguistic radar. Here's a look at four questionable examples from the episode.
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Just in time for Sunday's season premiere of "Mad Men," my latest "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine considers how authentically the show represents the speech of the 1960s. The creators of the AMC series, led by head honcho Matthew Weiner, are obsessive about getting the details of language right, just like all the other details of the show. But fans can be equally obsessive, on the lookout for the smallest linguistic anachronisms.
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This month in the Language Lounge, we take a look at an underappreciated grammatical category: submodifiers. We hope that by shining the spotlight briefly on the term, we might win over a few converts, as well as alert readers to the nuances of the delightful class of words so designated.
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Once again award-winning writer and educator Bob Greenman takes us on a journey through words selected from More Words That Make a Difference, a delightful book illustrating word usage with passages from the Atlantic Monthly.
Continue reading...
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