Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Words
Any news event brings new terms and phrases to life while reinvigorating old ones. Look how the recent Presidential election spread malarkey, binders full of women, and bayonets across headlines and tweets. Forevermore, those words will jog the memory of anyone who was paying attention to the 2012 election.
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Last year, Season 2 of the popular British TV series "Downton Abbey" yielded a bumper crop of linguistic anachronisms. In Season 3, now airing stateside on PBS, the out-of-place language has continued. There was a particularly glaring anachronism in the most recently aired episode: "steep learning curve."
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
When Life Imitates the Movies: From "Gaslighting" to "Catfishing"
If you've been following the strange saga of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o, then you've likely come across the term "catfishing" to describe the type of prank he fell victim to, in which a romantic interest turns out to be nothing more than a fabricated online identity. The term comes from the 2010 documentary "Catfish," but as I describe in my latest Boston Globe column, it's not the first time that a cinematic depiction has spawned a new verb.
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Over the years of teaching English as a foreign language, I've noticed how some of my students adopt some of the throwaway words and phrases that I use unthinkingly. The two words that are adopted most are stuff and thing (though I just as easily say thingy while waving a hand to indicate that I don't know or can't remember the correct word).
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The presidential inaugural address, that quadrennial high point in American political rhetoric, invariably attracts a huge amount of attention. President Obama's address yesterday was the subject of meticulous scrutiny: his word choice, his rhetorical devices, and even his grammar all were analyzed by countless language kibitzers.
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In the wake of all the gleeful bashing of "phablet" (an ungainly blend of "phone" and "tablet"), we're opening up the floor. What words get your goat? "Moist"? "Slacks"? How about "nostril"?
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Last week, the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year honors went to the Twitter-friendly hashtag. But another techie term emerged in a less prestigious category, Least Likely to Succeed. Finishing in a virtual tie with the much-maligned acronym YOLO was phablet, a blend of phone and tablet coined for new devices that are not quite smartphones and not quite tablet computers.
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