Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Usage
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Obama administration is "urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling 'regime alteration.'" That sounds like a kinder, gentler version of regime change, which itself has a euphemistic ring to it. If President Obama came into office riding a wave of change, why is that word suddenly problematic?
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Last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Delaware English professor Ben Yagoda wrote about the clunky prose style he noticed in his students' compositions, including "a boom in Britishisms." Now Yagoda has created a wiki page to keep track of Britishisms creeping into American usage. Here is what Yagoda has collected so far.
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This is a strange expression, often heard in the form: “You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face [when X happens].” But what does it mean and where does it come from?
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The American Dialect Society’s annual meeting is coming up, and like all word nerds, I have Word of the Year fever. I won’t be in Pittsburgh for the meeting, but as the only euphemism columnist in this star quadrant, I want to make a case for euphemism of the year.
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Have you noticed that curators, once restricted to institutions like museums and art galleries, are now running rampant? Research librarian Stan Friedman investigates curator-mania, and discovers that people are finding comfort in an old, trusted term.
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Last week, an exciting new tool for analyzing the history of language and culture was unveiled by Google. They call it the "Ngram Viewer," and it's an interface to study the enormous corpus of historical texts scanned by Google Books. The Ngram Viewer was rolled out in conjunction with a paper in the journal Science introducing the field of "culturomics." Dennis Baron has weighed in on the significance of this development for researchers. But what about those peculiar words, culturomics and ngram?
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Sarah Palin's political opponents made hay out of her gaffe last Wednesday, when she said on Glenn Beck's radio show that "We gotta stand with our North Korean allies," when she meant "South Korean allies." Palin fought back with a Thanksgiving Facebook message that pointed to numerous slips of the tongue by President Obama. I don't find her "North Korean" error particularly remarkable (she was swiftly corrected by Beck, and she didn't confuse North and South Korea elsewhere in her remarks). I was more interested in what she said before that: "We're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do." Was her use of sanction also erroneous?
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