Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from September, 2009
The National Football League kicked into gear this past weekend, accompanied by the usual hoopla from the sports media. In honor of the start of the football season, the television show "NFL Films Presents" put together a segment on the word hut, an interjection shouted by quarterbacks when initiating a play. They asked a number of NFL players and coaches their theories about the origin of hut, and then called upon a linguist to set the record straight. That linguist happened to be me, so I found myself unaccountably sharing air time with the likes of Don Shula and Tom Coughlin.
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In this selection from Inside Words: Tools for Teaching Academic Vocabulary, Janet Allen presents a great instructional activity to make words come alive for students, encouraging them to see how vocabulary relates to real-world context.
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What happens when a misspelling gets enshrined in official documentation? Mike Pope, a technical writer and editor at Microsoft, looks at some embarrassing typographical errors that continue to linger in the world of computer programming.
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It's the first Monday in September, when the United States observes Labor Day by avoiding labor. Today is a holiday north of the border too, but in Canada it's called Labour Day. Labour, of course, is the accepted spelling in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries like Canada. Americans prefer labor to labour, just as they prefer color, favor, honor, humor, neighbor, and a few dozen other words ending in -o(u)r. How did the spellings diverge?
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Today's Mailbag Friday question comes from Bob D., a doctor from Newton, Massachusetts. Bob asks: "What is up with the constant misuse of the word regime? It drives me crazy. It is like regimen never existed."
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Just in time for the beginning of the school year, linguist Neal Whitman investigates how "back to school" got transformed from a prepositional phrase to a noun phrase.
It's time for back to school! With Labor Day just around the corner, back to school is days away for many students across the nation, and for many others it has already come. Continue reading...
Recently, at the vibrant dog community in Chicago's Lincoln Park, a two-pound, three-month-old malti-poo puppy was engaged in a rigorous, Pepe le Pew-like program of incessantly humping every dog in his path. Well, not every dog. He did stick to pooches that were somewhat in his "league," such as my own 12-pound rat terrier, who thankfully didn't bite the preposterous puppy's head off for taking such liberties.
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