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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
"Did You Mean...?": When Ambiguity Foils Communication
Does "semiannual" mean twice a year or every two years? And other stumpers.
In day-to-day discourse, we don't usually encounter terms that are genuinely problematic. If someone throws something at us that's clearly wrong, like calvary for cavalry, we still get it. If my dialect is "She took a cake to the party," whereas yours is "She brought a cake to the party," I'll still understand you.
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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Word Tasting Note: "Hark"
"Hark! The herald angels sing..." Or is it "Hark the herald, angels sing"?
On his Sesquiotica blog, writer, editor, and designer James Harbeck has a regular feature that he calls "Word Tasting Notes." "Words are delicious and intoxicating," Harbeck writes. "So why not taste them like a fine wine?" Here, he delves into the history of a word we frequently hear (or mishear) during the holiday season: hark.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Passing Away or Kicking the Bucket? The Lexicon of Dying
How English, like other languages, provides many expressions for death.
Death has been in the news lately, with the passing of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and former Czech president Vaclav Havel within hours of each other. Despite the very different legacies of the two world leaders, most English-language news outlets used the same wording to describe their deaths: in obituaries, both Kim and Havel simply died. But English, like many other world languages, has a rich vocabulary of terms for dying, from the blunt to the euphemistic.
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Just in time for the holiday season, Merrill Perlman takes a look at the origins of some yuletide expressions.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
The Year in Words, 2011 Edition
Taking a look back at some lexical favorites.
Yes, it's time for that annual tradition: picking the words and phrases that best define the past year. Did occupy occupy your attention? Were you talking about tiger moms or tiger blood? Or were you paralyzed by the condition known as FOMO (fear of missing out)?
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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
The Terms of Christmas, Present
Christmas classics have injected many words and phrases into the language.
My wife and I were out Christmas shopping last week and came home with an armload of classic holiday DVDs that we somehow didn't already own. She'd gathered up every title you probably know, and we spent a couple of evenings watching our way through the pile. During this latter-day review of the holiday favorites of our childhood, it struck me that there were a surprising number of terms and phrases that had become familiar either directly from these Christmas classics or from their sources.
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Teachers at WorkA column about teaching
Teaching the Power of Word Coinage
Get students hooked on language by having them make their own words.
Kitty. Tron. Legit. All these words appeared in the 2011 edition of the yearbook I sponsor. Students used these as slang; all three were used to describe something cool. Aside from legit, which seems to have been around for a while, I'm not sure the other two stuck.
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