Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Usage
The current love of my life is Green's Dictionary of Slang: an enormous, meticulous, ridiculously wonderful historical dictionary that's the biggest slang collection ever made (uncurated Wiki-crapola like Urban Dictionary doesn't count). Jonathon Green's slangapalooza is an extraordinary source for fulfilling this column's mission: finding under-the-radar euphemisms.
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
"Kinetic" Connections
Following the death of Osama bin Laden, a new addition comes to the lexicon of war.
The killing of Osama bin Laden by a team of Navy SEALs has brought new attention to the military term kinetic, referring to violent (or lethal) actions in the field of battle. Our resident linguist Neal Whitman takes a look to this addition to the lexicon of war.
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Blog Excerpts
A Bin Laden Lexicon
On her Fritinancy blog, Visual Thesaurus contributor Nancy Friedman examines some of the words and phrases that have emerged in the coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden, including Abbottabad, double tap, triumphalism, and halo effect. Read her post here.
Much of the media narrative leading up to today's wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton has focused on Kate's "commoner" background, particularly her mother's family, hailing from the humble coal-mining country of northern England. In class-conscious British society, differences in social background come through in speech patterns -- as anyone who's seen "My Fair Lady" knows. So how have the royal family and the middle-class Middletons navigated this tricky linguistic terrain?
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Blog Excerpts
Different From, Than, or To?
Stan Carey, one of our regular contributors, has a detailed post on his Sentence First blog about different from, than, and to. Though the than and to variants are often considered incorrect, Stan argues that these are simply dialectal differences. Read the whole thing here.
The prolific British language writer, David Crystal, has produced another winner: A Little Book of Language (now out in paperback), which Publishers Weekly calls "the perfect primer for anyone interested in the subject." In this excerpt, Crystal explains how language changes, from vocabulary to grammar.
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The other night I was sitting next to an Austrian teacher of English at a restaurant in Brighton, in southern England. He was a bit puzzled by an item on the menu which offered "Pan roasted local skate wing, crushed ratte potatoes, sautéed spinach, caper, lemon & parsley butter."
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