Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from December, 2009
Last week, members of the Special Libraries Association were asked to vote on a radical renaming of their organization: it was proposed that the SLA become the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals, or ASKPro. The contentious wrangling over the proposal revealed deep ambivalence about the words library and librarian in the digital age. We asked Stan Friedman, senior research librarian for Condé Nast Publications, for some insights into the terminological debate.
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This time last year, David Letterman was making jokes about Blagojeviching, playing on the name of disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Now we've got a brand-new political eponym on our hands: Salahi is being used as a verb meaning "to gate-crash an official event."
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Veteran copy editor John E. McIntyre holds forth entertainingly on all manner of issues related to language and editing on his blog, "You Don't Say." Here McIntyre wonders why we're stuck with the term foodie when there are so many serviceable gastronomic alternatives.
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Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she looks at the all-too-common confusion of principal and principle.
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The end-of-the-year movie rush is upon us, when the studios roll out their high-prestige projects. I've been thinking about words related to two major movies of the season: Up in the Air (now in theaters), adapted from the novel of the same name by Walter Kirn, and Avatar (coming soon!), the sci-fi extravaganza from James Cameron of Titanic fame.
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In his latest monthly roundup of under-the-radar euphemisms, Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters gets all pop-cultural, finding inspiration from the likes of 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy.
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"Survival of the Fittest" is just one example of the many slam-dunk vocabulary activities that Janet Allen offers to teachers of all content areas in Inside Words: Tools for Teaching Academic Vocabulary. Check out how this activity could play out in the science classroom in our lesson plan, "Vocabulary Bursting With Energy."
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