Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Language
A recent trip to an amusement park with his sons Doug and Adam got linguist Neal Whitman thinking about the evolution of the word awesome, and how it took such a different historical turn from its sibling awful.
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Last Sunday I responded to an intriguing question from a reader of the New York Times Magazine "On Language" column, dealing with a meaning of the word revert that was previously unfamiliar to me. As I discovered, revert can mean "reply" in a number of varieties of world English, particularly the English of the Indian subcontinent. But revert is hardly the only English word that has moved on a special trajectory in Indian English.
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Would you still purchase a "3-piece European-style outdoor bistro set" if you had to pay a "European-style value-added-tax" on it? This month in the Lounge we look at the changing fortunes of all things European.
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Blog Excerpts
Parliamentary Language
Contentini, a UK-based content strategy firm, has analyzed 75 years of British parliamentary debates to determine trends in the political use of language. Key words like stakeholder and innovation have risen in usage, while others like industry and men have fallen. Read about it here.
With new technology comes new language, and with new language comes new confusion over usage. Here's a question that people have been puzzling over for a couple of decades now: if we don't pluralize mail as mails, why should we pluralize e-mail as e-mails?
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Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First. Here Stan enlightens us about an Irish word borrowed into English, galore.
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It's been a whirlwind week since the official announcement that I would be taking over the "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, the old stomping grounds of the late lamented Language Maven, William Safire. I'm grateful for all of the warm messages of congratulation I've received, and I also remain cognizant that in taking over Safire's column, I have extremely big shoes to fill.
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