Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from July, 2008
Last Friday I was delighted to be a return guest on the Wisconsin Public Radio Show "At Issue with Ben Merens" (audio available here). Our ostensible topic was "words of the summer" (including skadoosh, of course!), but once we started taking calls from listeners, the floor was open to any topic of interest to word-savvy Wisconsinites. Much like what happened when I was on the show last December, conversation turned to perceived "gaps" in the English language that callers thought should be filled with new coinages. This time around, Robert from Coloma expressed dissatisfaction with the words boyfriend and girlfriend, suggesting a new word to cover both: inti-mate.
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If there's one word that captures the zeitgeist of our current economic downturn, it's subprime. The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Year for 2007, and as I described in my last column it is among the new entries in the latest updates of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. But it's a pretty odd word when you stop to think about it. The newly announced Merriam-Webster definition reads as follows: "having or being an interest rate that is higher than a prime rate and is extended especially to low-income borrowers." Wait a minute: a loan with a rate that is higher than prime is called sub-prime? How did that happen?
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Blog Excerpts
Crossing the Pond
Everybody knows about differences between American and British English like truck vs. lorry or elevator vs. lift. On her blog Separated by a Common Language, Lynne Murphy (an American linguist teaching in the UK) takes on subtler distinctions like proctor vs. invigilate or day care vs. crèche.
Dictionary publishers don't get too many opportunities for creating PR buzz, but one surefire way of getting some attention is to announce the new words (and new senses of old words) that have been added in the latest update to a particular dictionary. In the past few days there have been new-word announcements for two major dictionaries, one in the US and one in the UK: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (also in its 11th edition, coincidentally enough). Let's take a look at what they're adding.
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Teachers at WorkA column about teaching
Vocabulary Instruction: The Non-Amorphous Shape of Word Knowledge
The other day, my two teenage sons cajoled me into watching a movie they both find tremendously amusing. The film is not new. It's called Kangaroo Jack, and features Christopher Walken playing a small-time thug named Sal. Although Sal is the head of a bumbling crime family, he feels very insecure about his word knowledge, and throughout the film he is seen making a desperate attempt at self-improvement through the use of a tape-recorded vocabulary tutorial. In my favorite scene, a soothing female voice on Sal's tape player defines the word amorphous — having no shape or form, and then directs Sal to use the word in a sentence. Sal responds with this beauty: "After Joey Clams got whacked, his head was amorphous."
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Welcome to the latest installment of Mailbag Friday, our new feature for answering readers' questions about word origins. For this special Fourth of July edition, we have a very timely query from Jason B. from Wilmington, DE. "I've heard a lot of stories about the origin of 'hot dog.' What's the frank truth? I await your answer with relish."
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Blog Excerpts
Capitol Words
Want to find out Topic A in the U.S. Congress on any given day? Check out Capitol Words, which computes the most frequently appearing word in the daily record. While Congress is out of session, you can browse through previous hot topics.
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