Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Vocabulary
Earlier this week I appeared as a guest on the NPR show "Charlotte Talks" (from Charlotte, North Carolina) to talk about language in the electronic age. Callers expressed a fair amount of hand-wringing about how English usage is under fire from new modes of communication, from text-messaging to social media sites. Rather than focusing on the negative, I'd like to celebrate some of the innovative linguistic forms that have been bubbling up online.
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If you feared the end of the Bush administration meant there would be no more preposterous government-propelled euphemisms to keep us warm and confused in these dark nights of the soul, fear not! And while you're non-afraid, how'd you like to buy some legacy assets?
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While teaching roots and affixes may help students make sense of unfamiliar words, supplying students with long lists of "word parts" can sometimes be overwhelming and unproductive. In this excerpt from Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools, academic vocabulary expert Robert J. Marzano explains how to focus instruction on those affixes and roots that will give you the most vocab-enriching bang for your buck!
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Have you browsed through a dictionary (the kind printed on paper) lately? If you have, the publishers of it are probably glad you did, while being aware that you may be part of a dying breed. This month the Lounge is the first of a two-parter examining some implications of dictionary-making in the digital age.
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"Swine flu is the new Susan Boyle of search terms," announces a headline in Australia's The Age. The Scottish singing sensation was last week's news: people are no longer busy conducting online searches for Ms. Boyle (or for her favored expression, gobsmacked). Instead, they're trying to discover anything they can about swine flu, now that health authorities are warning of a possible pandemic. Let's take a look at how the disease got its name.
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Blog Excerpts
A Million Words? Not So Fast...
Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer explains to Washington Post Book World why the claim that English is adding its millionth word lacks credibility.
Forbes.com is running a special report on neologisms — all about how and why new words enter the language. And the Visual Thesaurus family is well-represented, with featured articles by editor Ben Zimmer and contributor Mark Peters.
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