Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Usage
Last week, the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year honors went to the Twitter-friendly hashtag. But another techie term emerged in a less prestigious category, Least Likely to Succeed. Finishing in a virtual tie with the much-maligned acronym YOLO was phablet, a blend of phone and tablet coined for new devices that are not quite smartphones and not quite tablet computers.
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How often do you see an article about the search for the origin of a phrase on the homepage of the New York Times website? Just about... never. And yet the Times today has a story about the history of an expression that we've delved into a couple of times in this space: "the whole nine yards." Diligent word-sleuthing has turned up a rather unexpected predecessor: "the whole six yards."
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For my latest Boston Globe column, I talked to screenwriter Tony Kushner about how he crafted the dialogue for Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln." I had been intrigued about Kushner's script-writing process after hearing that he had consulted the Oxford English Dictionary to check any word that might have been inappropriate for the film's 1865 setting. While the results of this painstaking work are admirable, it's always possible to nitpick over possible anachronisms.
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In the leadup to President Obama's win over Mitt Romney, a number of political commentators described the presidential race as not just "tight" but "razor-tight." Ultimately, the razor-tight description was apt in such battleground states as Ohio, Florida, and Virginia, but not so much in the overall electoral results. But wait a minute: why razor-tight?
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The headlines were full of "disruption" last week, as Superstorm Sandy ravaged the East Coast. "Hurricane Sandy Disrupts Millions of Lives" read the headline on a New York Times slide show. Sandy "continues to disrupt New York entertainment industry," CBS News warned a day after the storm passed through. Subway, train, and air travel was disrupted, as was phone and cable service, and there was even concern that power outages would disrupt voting in today's election.
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Blog Excerpts
Ain't This Good English?
David Skinner's new book, The Story of Ain't, is about the controversy that surrounded the 1961 publication of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, which was blasted for not coming down hard enough on nonstandard words like ain't. Skinner looks at how far we've come in our view of slang and dictionaries in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, "Ain't This Good English?" And read more about Webster's Third in Ben Zimmer's Word Routes column last year celebrating the dictionary's 50th birthday.
Like is a powerful word. It's a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, and conjunction. It demonstrates preferences and shows relationships. It even acts as filler when we're trying to put our thoughts in order. Not all uses of like are equally accepted, however.
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