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Articles about Vocabulary
With the teams competing in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament whittled down to the Final Four, "March Madness" is coming to a close. (Actually, as has been the case for a few decades now, March Madness extends into the beginning of April, when the semifinal and final games are played.) In honor of college hoops, I've selected a "Final Four" of important terms associated with the tournament.
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Is it possible to take vocabulary expansion too far? In a piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Bernstein points out the situations where word-knowledge can work against you, making the point that "language junkies" might want to be careful lest they alienate people they're trying to impress, or just render themselves incomprehensible.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Word Tasting Note: "Varmint"
We all know what this: the fauna equivalent of a weed.
We all know what a varmint is, thanks to Yosemite Sam (and others). It's an annoying animal (or person), the fauna equivalent of a weed. It's something (or someone) who takes your nice, tidy set-up, your lovely garden or lawn or your livestock, and makes a mess of it. Before you had a good environment; now you have a nasty varmint.
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The issues surrounding the Russian state and the area of Ukraine known as Crimea involve centuries of history and complex issues of sovereignty and self-determination. In an effort to untangle at least some of these issues, we've made a list of 60 vocabulary words drawn from Putin's speech of March 18, 2014.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
Dept. of Word Lists
It's National Reading Month... But Don't Worry!
If you've got nine minutes, Time's Katy Steinmetz has nine reading suggestions for you
For National Reading Month, Time's Katy Steinmetz gives us "9 Great Things to Read in (Roughly) 9 Minutes," a column devoted to reading in contexts other than great books of the "big, blubbery" Moby Dick variety.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
Decimate. Literally. Hopefully. These words, and others like them, provoke so much ire in some readers that they become troublesome to use. Critics feel that the writer is using the word in an unauthorized way, that it's being using to mean what it does not mean.
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Jim Burke's The English Teacher's Companion includes a list of 358 academic vocabulary words culled from a survey of textbooks, assignments, standards, and examinations. Although the term academic vocabulary means different things to different educators, I like to think of Burke's use of the term as representing the vocabulary of directions.
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