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Who Says Teens Don't Use Big Words?
NY Times Summer Reading Contest Winners prove them wrong
As judge last week for The Fourth Annual New York Times Summer Reading Contest, we at Vocabulary.com were impressed by the ease and fluency with which teen writers used specific and powerful words.
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Edward Snowden's leaking of National Security Agency information has put the term whistleblower back in the news. Since the early 1970s, whistleblower has come to be seen as a positive term, but before that it had been decidedly negative for many decades.
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SAT tutor Leigh Cousins, MS describes her summer campaign "to get [her] students AND their parents" to learn ten words on Vocabulary.com every morning as they eat breakfast.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Debunking the Legend of "Upset"
Or is it a story too good to check?
Some stories about word origins recall the old Italian saying, se è non vero, è ben trovato: even if it is not true, it is well invented. One such too-good-to-check story involves the sporting usage of upset, which, it is said, came to be because an unfavored horse named Upset beat the great thoroughbred Man o' War.
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Blog Excerpts
Upheaval in Egypt: Is It a "Coup"?
Semantics meets foreign policy with some serious diplomatic implications.
Since the overthrow of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, U.S. government officials have been wrestling with a question of semantics: should Morsi's removal be called a coup? The answer to the question has serious foreign-policy implications.
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High/low, yes/no, black/white. There's something reassuring about opposites. A lot of vocabulary teaching is done using pairs of opposites, and with good reason: learners really feel they have a handle on a concept if they grasp its antithesis. There are, however, some other concept families that are best learned using three terms — triples — that provide a middle ground which in turn enhances all three concepts.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Vocabulary Shout-Out: Nick Paumgarten for "Jawboning"
Check out a sense of this word specific to financial/political spheres
In writing about Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten invoked a very specific sense of the verb jawbone.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
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