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Articles about Vocabulary
Part two of our interview with William Safire focuses on new political terms that have entered the latest edition of Safire's Political Dictionary. Below, for your delectation, you'll find extended excerpts from relevant dictionary entries.
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Welcome to "Word Routes," a new column where your fearless editor will chart a course through a sea of words. We'll be looking at how new words emerge on the scene and how older ones have changed over time. Think of it as a series of dispatches from the frontlines of our dynamic and ever-shifting language. Often we'll focus on a single word or phrase and tease apart the layers of meaning and usage, with the Visual Thesaurus wordmaps providing special insight. First up is a word near and dear to my heart: procrastination.
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William Safire is surely known to Visual Thesaurus readers as the man behind "On Language," the weekly New York Times Magazine column that he has penned continuously since 1979. From 1973 to 2005 he was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for the Times, taking on the persona of a "vituperative right-wing scandalmonger," in his own self-deprecating terms. But since retiring from the Op/Ed page, his "word maven" persona is now ascendant, particularly with the latest edition of Safire's Political Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2008), a book that Newsweek has hailed as "the definitive work on the subject."
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To supplement our two-part interview with William Safire about the new edition of Safire's Political Dictionary, we've provided extended excerpts from the dictionary entries that came up in the course of our wide-ranging discussion. If you want to know the difference between an old pro and a curmudgeon, read on!
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Does Art imitate Life? When the written word is involved it's not always easy to tell. This month in the Lounge, we examine the curious phenomenon of English word patterns that seem to occur mainly in fiction writing.
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Blog Excerpts
Words in the Brain
Ever wonder where, exactly, words are stored in your brain? We thought so! Read the Sharp Brains blog's fascinating explanation, plus give your own gray matter a workout with a word-associations exercise. Check it all out here.
If your Saturday night needs some excitement, join us here in the Lounge for our weekly linguistic adventure: it's a thrill ride that you can enjoy without leaving the comfort of your recliner!
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