In a Washington Post review of a recent performance by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Robert Battey used the word velleity. Once you know what it means you may find yourself dropping it into everyday speech, but for one reader, learning new words is not what the news should be all about.Continue reading...
When you come across a word like eleemosynary, it's time to whip out the binoculars and step into the waders. Reading has become word watching, where, as in bird watching, rarity is the thrill.Continue reading...
Writing for Vulture about changes in format for television shows, New York Magazine critic Matt Zoller Seitz called the new, freer-form series "bespoke TV." So what does this word used to describe custom-made clothing mean in a television context?Continue reading...
Writing for Vulture, "the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future," The Roots' Questlove uses the word trivial in such a knowledgeable and cool way we had to offer up a shout-out.Continue reading...
In an editorial for the Chicago Tribune yesterday, columnist Eric Zorn took issue with the College Board's inclusion of obsequious in a list of "low-frequency words that would be unlikely to be assessed directly as words-in-context questions on the redesigned SAT."Continue reading...
In spite of the fact that the Harry Potter series is often embarked on by children in the youngest elementary school grades, the series is a treasure trove of sophisticated, SAT-worthy vocabulary. Dirigible as it appears in the Potterverse, is a word you're likely not soon to forget.Continue reading...
Leslie Jamison's "cerebral, witty, multichambered essays [that] tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say that we feel someone else's pain." The word for this phenomenon, of course, is empathy, which Jamison explores in a bold and interesting way.Continue reading...