Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Usage
The artists were being praised for their technique in which, the article said, they "use only pallet knives, not brushes." The conference attendees were told that "it's not too early to start whetting your palette for" the food expected to be served. And the article talked about a shipment of "wooden palates infested with the Asian long-horned beetle." Possibly wrong, wrong, and ouch.
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Vocabulary Shout-Out: Kathryn Schulz for "Recrudescence"
A subtle way to call something "crud."
In the May 13 issue of New York Magazine, Kathryn Schulz introduced a critique of F. Scott Fitzgerald's much-beloved The Great Gatsby by referring to the current movie-driven Gatsby resurgence as a recrudescence:: "Since we find ourselves, as we cyclically do here, in the middle of another massive Gatsby recrudescence, allow me to file a minority report."
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An Inside Higher Ed article recently quoted Duke University physics professor Steffen Bass as describing the foolish stance of some of his colleagues as "bologna." Prof. Bass surely said baloney, a spelling that represents an Americanized pronunciation of bologna sausage, and it also came to mean "nonsense" in the 1920s.
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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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Having logged many years teaching English and theatre at New York City high schools, Shannon Reed now teaches freshman English Composition at the University of Pittsburgh. Here Shannon shows how teachers can work with students to improve their writing by focusing on five overused words.
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In my latest column for The Boston Globe, I observed that Beantown has more than its fair share of local terms for sketchy traffic maneuvers: the Boston left, the Boston bump, the Boston block, and so forth. But these regional labels can be found all over the country, and new ones keep cropping up.
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Jonathon Owen is a copy editor and student of linguistics who "holds the paradoxical view that it's possible to be a prescriptivist and descriptivist simultaneously." Here, he looks at how people can get tripped up on words with unusual plural forms like phenomena.
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