Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from August, 2010
Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Slaterisms: Have You Ever Wanted to "Hit the Slide"?
The JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater became an overnight folk hero (for some) after news spread of his theatrical resignation: cursing out a passenger over the intercom, grabbing a beer, deploying the plane's emergency slide, and sliding down to the tarmac in a blaze of glory. With a story so compelling, it's no surprise that admirers are now coming up with Slater-specific expressions to describe "take this job and shove it" moments.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Dan Brown Lexicography: "Secret Vault of Non-Words!"
A lot of silly things get written about the craft of dictionary-making, but a story that appeared last week in the London-based Daily Telegraph just might be the most nonsensical article about lexicography in recent memory. The breathless headline reads, "Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered." What a scoop! Has the Telegraph blown the lid off a cabal of Dictionary Illuminati worthy of a Dan Brown novel? Yeah, not so much.
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
The Gender-Neutral Pronoun: Still an Epic(ene) Fail
University of Illinois English professor Dennis Baron writes:
Every once in a while some concerned citizen decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral (or "epicene") pronouns for a century and a half, all to no avail. Continue reading...
With everybody heading out to the beach this summer, my latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine looks at the local lingo of shore towns. Beach-related regionalisms can get quite colorful, especially when it comes to epithets for the seasonal hordes of visitors.
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I can only imagine how annoying the words Twitter and tweet are to people who haven't gotten in on the microblogging phenomenon. It's been over a year since I embraced all things tweet-y, and I like it so much that I continue praying to Zeus daily that Twitter never goes the way of Friendster and the pet rock. (Public service announcement: Neuter your pet rock. You can never be too careful.)
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Blog Excerpts
Further Thoughts on "Refudiate"
Still mulling over Sarah Palin's use of the word refudiate? Check out these two commentaries. In his Good magazine column, Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters uses Refudiate-gate as an opportunity for a "Sarah Palin retrospective" here. And Geoff Nunberg argues on NPR's "Fresh Air" that the reactions to Palin's gaffe were more telling than the gaffe itself, here.
English is my native tongue, language is my beat, and corporate America is where I earn my daily crust. Nevertheless, every so often I encounter an English word — in a corporate memo, speech, or email — that mystifies me. I've seen the word before; I've just never seen it used that way. I've always assumed the word meant one thing; here it obviously means something very different.
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