Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from February, 2010
Just in time for the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, linguist Neal Whitman has been thinking about a phrase that seems to guarantee victory: win-win situation. What does this "no-lose" proposition really mean?
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Blog Excerpts
Cheers and Jeers for "Podium"
"Here's one safe prediction for the Winter Olympics," writes Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer in the New York Times Magazine. "Competitors and commentators will use podium as a verb, as in, 'She can definitely podium here today.' And just as predictably, some observers will shudder at the word." Read the rest here.
Over the last few days, America's Eastern seaboard has seen record levels of snow... accompanied by record levels of snow wordplay. There has been a blizzard of "portmanteau words" involving snow, with snowmageddon and snowpocalypse leading the way. On Twitter, the hashtag of choice has been snOMG, compactly joining snow with the online interjection OMG. We haven't seen this much seasonal word-blending since 2008's "summer of the staycation."
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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 takes an extended look at the troublesome issue of when to hyphenate compounds.
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On OUPblog, the official blog of Oxford University Press, sociolinguist Alexandra D'Arcy has kicked off a new column by penning an ode to her grandmother, "a firm advocate of correctness" who "in the proud tradition of language purists... found anything other than 'the standard' objectionable."
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After writing about "crash blossoms" in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I've gotten plenty of responses from readers sending in their own favorite examples of unintentionally ambiguous headlines. I've also been hearing more about an anecdote I mentioned, relating to a legendary telegram long attributed to Cary Grant.
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I have to admit, I'm still basking in the glow of last month's American Dialect Society meeting, when my two picks for 2009's Most Euphemistic — hiking the Appalachian trail and sea kittens — each took home an award. Hiking killed it in the euph category, while the sea kittens swam over to "Most Unnecessary" and took the prize. Booyah, and may I add, for the benefit of older readers, huzzah!
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