Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Usage
When you obsess about words as much as I do, it's hard to pick a favorite. It's like Batman picking his favorite criminal lowlife. How do you choose between the Joker, Two Face, the Penguin, and the scum who killed your parents? It's just too painful.
But what the heck, here's a good candidate, and it's also exhibit Q in the case of why I love the Dictionary of American Regional English: peedoodle.
Continue reading...Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Owning the Podium (and the Lectern)
Depending on whether you're an Olympic athlete or President Obama, podium's meaning can change.
What's the difference between a podium and a lectern?
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Earlier this month on Blog Excerpts we featured Alexandra D'Arcy's OUPblog post, "Ode to a Prescriptivist," which drew a sharp dichotomy between linguistic descriptivism and prescriptivism (personified by D'Arcy and her stern grandmother, respectively). D'Arcy's post inspired Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, to write a typically thoughtful post on his blog, Sentence First.
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Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing provides "bite-sized lessons to improve your writing" on her engaging blog The Writing Resource. Here Erin tackles the tricky distinction between compose and comprise.
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Just in time for the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, linguist Neal Whitman has been thinking about a phrase that seems to guarantee victory: win-win situation. What does this "no-lose" proposition really mean?
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Blog Excerpts
Cheers and Jeers for "Podium"
"Here's one safe prediction for the Winter Olympics," writes Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer in the New York Times Magazine. "Competitors and commentators will use podium as a verb, as in, 'She can definitely podium here today.' And just as predictably, some observers will shudder at the word." Read the rest here.
Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she takes an extended look at the troublesome issue of when to hyphenate compounds.
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