It's happened again: Los Angeles Times readers are up in arms over vocabulary. Last time it was a contretemps over a letter to the editor complaining about tough words like, um, contretemps. This time it's commenters on the LA Times movie blog, "The Big Picture," who are slamming a post about the title of a forthcoming movie, Synecdoche, New York.Continue reading...
A little while back we reported on a Los Angeles Times reader complaining about difficult vocabulary words like contretemps and phantasmagoria appearing in the newspaper. Other L.A. Times readers (and our own commenters) vehemently disagreed, saying that newspapers should shun the old maxim, "Don't use big words." The New York Times Magazine clearly does not have a "No Big Words" policy, since Sunday's edition featured an article with a favorite word of the late logophile William F. Buckley, Jr.: eristic.Continue reading...
Last Friday I was delighted to be a return guest on the Wisconsin Public Radio Show "At Issue with Ben Merens" (audio available here). Our ostensible topic was "words of the summer" (including skadoosh, of course!), but once we started taking calls from listeners, the floor was open to any topic of interest to word-savvy Wisconsinites. Much like what happened when I was on the show last December, conversation turned to perceived "gaps" in the English language that callers thought should be filled with new coinages. This time around, Robert from Coloma expressed dissatisfaction with the words boyfriend and girlfriend, suggesting a new word to cover both: inti-mate.Continue reading...
The "Letters to the Editor" section of the Los Angeles Times has featured some heated discussion about what kind of vocabulary is suitable for printing in a newspaper. And no, this doesn't have anything to do with the "seven dirty words" famously satirized by the late lamented George Carlin. Instead, it's about some moderately challenging vocab items that you might expect to find on a Visual Thesaurus word list.Continue reading...
The untimely passing of Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press, has led many to reminisce about his lasting influence on political reporting. Some obituaries mentioned that Russert has been credited with popularizing the terms "red state" and "blue state," to refer to states favoring Republican or Democratic candidates. Though Russert's memorable analysis of the twists and turns of the 2000 presidential election no doubt played a significant role in popularizing the "red/blue state" designations, the history of the color coding is surprisingly complicated.Continue reading...