Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Language
We've been thinking about the data cloud in the Lounge these days. "What data cloud?" you may ask, and well that you should: it's a term relatively new to English and it hasn't yet settled down to a single fixed meaning. The data cloud we've been thinking about is the Big One: the nebulous dataset consisting of all the data that is, in principle, at your fingertips when they are poised above an Internet-connected keyboard.
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Blog Excerpts
False Words
Frescata? Bananarcalepsy? Dreadhawk? Any of these ring a bell? They're all entries in a fascinating online project to document "false words" called Fauxlogism. Check out their entire list.
For the past three decades Professor Connie Eble has been pursuing a unique project: Tracking the slang of her students. The in-house linguist of the University of North Carolina's English Department, she polls her students every semester about their non-standard language. This long-term research has given Professor Eble a singular window into the function of language in society, which she discusses in her book Slang and Sociability. Professor Eble recently gathered the latest crop of slang from her students, so we called her to find out what she found, and what it means.
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Do you feel called upon to justify the activity of reading the dictionary? Seek no further! This month we visit a poet who whiled away many hours with her eyes glued to the fine print, and ended up having quite a lot to show for it.
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So what exactly makes a word the Word of the Year? The Visual Thesaurus traveled to the American Dialect Society's annual meeting in Chicago last week to find out. For the past eighteen years this scholarly group has been selecting words or phrases that have become newly prominent or notable in American English. Their goal is to demonstrate that change in language is normal, nonstop -- and even fun.
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How do words enter our lexicon? Which ones survive in our language? Which ones die? Forensic linguist Dr. Allan Metcalf has developed a method to predict the success or failure of a word that's almost foolproof. English professor and registrar of MacMurray College in Illinois, Allan is also the Executive Secretary of the American Dialect Society, which famously announces their annual Word of the Year. It is this exercise that served as the catalyst for Allan's investigations, which he explains in his book Predicting New Words. We spoke to him about his fascinating findings, and, of course, the Word of the Year:
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Linguist Michael Erard, the author of Um. .. Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean who we recently interviewed, graciously sent us this article, which he first wrote and published in the magazine Lingua Franca:
In a recent issue of the moderated e-mail list Linguist, Brown University anthropologist William O. Beeman addressed an odd phenomenon: Apparently, there is a different word for butterfly in every language, even though historical relationships and geographic contacts often suggest the words should be similar. Beeman called it "the butterfly problem."
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