Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Vocabulary
Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First. Here Stan muses on the word "kill" and a special meaning it has in the colloquial English speech of Ireland.
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I listen to a lot of NPR. Unless the correspondent is doing a "man in the street"-type interview, the subjects generally appear intelligent, educated and literate. At least they used to. I've heard several malapropisms in recent weeks, some of which are so common that I figure it's time I spoke up.
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Blog Excerpts
Improve Your Iteracy Literacy
As its "Cool News of the Day," Reveries Magazine has featured the latest New York Times "On Language" column by Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer on "the iteracy afflicting Facebook, Google and others." Read more here (and read here for a previous "Cool News of the Day" tied to Zimmer's column on etymythology).
Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she tackles the question of how plural pants got transformed into singular pant.
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A recent trip to an amusement park with his sons Doug and Adam got linguist Neal Whitman thinking about the evolution of the word awesome, and how it took such a different historical turn from its sibling awful.
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Blog Excerpts
Most Looked-Up Words in the Times, 2010
Lately the Northern Californian slang word hella has been in the news, thanks to a well-publicized Facebook petition to make it the official prefix for 10 to the 27th power. Here we present a first-hand account of the cultural significance of hella from Samantha Strimling, a young journalist about to graduate from Piedmont High School in the San Francisco Bay area. We were pleased to make Samantha's acquaintance at a recent Visual Thesaurus presentation to the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.
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