Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Vocabulary
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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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
When News Breaks, People Look it up in the Dictionary
The Internet may be the new newspaper, but it's also become the new dictionary, and the two are inextricably linked: when news breaks, people rush online to find out what it means, and whether it's a noun or a verb.
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Unless you've been living under a rock for the past week, you've witnessed the spectacular media meltdown of Charlie Sheen unfold before your eyes. The endless stream of over-the-top pronouncements in Sheen's recent interviews has been captivating, and Sheenisms have quickly become inescapable online, especially on Twitter (where Sheen managed to attract a million followers in just over 24 hours). Tiger blood and Adonis DNA. Rock star from Mars. Gnarly gnarlingtons. Vatican assassin warlocks. And, of course, winning, the buzzword to beat them all. Does any of Sheen's frenetic verbiage have a chance of being remembered beyond the current moment of celebrity Schadenfreude, or should I say Sheenenfreude?
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We welcome back Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugal and other European countries. Fitch considers how a fun exercise in concocting collective nouns could be used as a tool for vocabulary expansion.
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In a publicity stunt, Toyota took out a New York Times ad, put out a YouTube video, and distributed a survey at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show, asking the public what the plural of Prius should be, in a campaign announcing that there is going to be a family of Prius models. I hesitate to reward them with more publicity for such a willfully dumb question. But I can’t help myself. This is too good an excuse to talk about the wider topic of phony Latinate plurals. Well-played, Toyota.
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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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In this special edition of Evasive Maneuvers, our euphemism-meister Mark Peters reviews a new book on verbal evasions, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms by Ralph Keyes. According to Keyes, euphemisms serve as "an excellent way to determine what we find embarrassing."
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