Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Words
On the latest installment of Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I look at the roots of the festive word carnival, associated with pre-Lenten celebrations around the Christian world. Some scholars speculate that the true origins of carnival actually lie in pagan rituals predating Christianity.
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Today's column features a wide range of euphemisms that passed through the eyes and ears of my narrow little pinhead. No matter where I run, skip, or prance, I can't escape lexical evasions.
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Last August, the folks at Oxford Dictionaries published a list of words that they were adding to their dictionaries. Among them was neckbeard, which is listed as "A growth of hair on a man's neck." But this self-describing definition is not why the term was added. More interestingly, the term connotes someone with "poor grooming habits" and who's "socially inept."
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Over the weekend, The New York Times presented an interactive quiz on newly prominent slang terms entitled "Are You On Fleek?" But what does "on fleek" mean, and how did it get to be such a trendy expression, especially on social media? Our resident linguist Neal Whitman investigates.
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The public radio show "On the Media" notes that "in the age of Snowden and Manning, the term 'whistleblower' is increasingly present in our media. But where exactly did the word come from?" Brooke Gladstone talked to our executive editor Ben Zimmer for some historical background.
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Last night, Jon Stewart announced that he will be retiring from Comedy Central's The Daily Show. We'll miss Stewart and his writing team for lots of reasons. But as dedicated vocabularians, we'll be especially sorry to see the end of Stewart's skewering of overhyped news through clever use of word blending, known as portmanteaus.
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Our To Kill a Mockingbird interactive word lists are among our most popular. But there's another kind of vocabulary you'll find in To Kill a Mockingbird: Southern-inflected words that testify to the more-defined regional nature of American English as it was spoken three quarters of a century ago. And with the news that Harper Lee will release a recently rediscovered novel written previous to To Kill a Mockingbird, we can only hope to find a rich store of Southern-inflected words there as well.
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