Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2010
Michael Lydon, a well-known writer on popular music since the 1960s, has for many years also been writing about writing. Lydon's essays, written with a colloquial clarity, shed fresh light on familiar and not so familiar aspects of the writing art. Here Lydon explores how short words are more potent than long words.
Continue reading...
If you watched the Oscars on Sunday, like many other viewers you were probably left scratching your head when, after "Music by Prudence" won for Best Documentary Short, there was a struggle for the microphone between two of the film's creators. Elinor Burkett snatched the microphone from Roger Ross Williams, in what was almost immediately dubbed a "Kanye moment." Or you could say Burkett "pulled a Kanye," or that Williams simply got "Kanye'd."
Continue reading...
Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
At the Movies: Plumbing the Depths of "The Hurt Locker"
One of the frontrunners for Best Picture in Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony is Kathryn Bigelow's tense depiction of a U.S. bomb squad unit in Iraq, The Hurt Locker. The movie's official website says of the title, "In Iraq, it is soldier vernacular to speak of explosions as sending you to 'the hurt locker.'" In fact, like so much American military slang, hurt locker (along with related hurt expressions) dates back to the Vietnam War.
Continue reading...
For National Grammar Day, linguist Neal Whitman takes a look at a long-standing source of contention among grammar enthusiasts: singular they. (Grammar purists, prepare yourselves for some unconventional rules!)
Continue reading...
When you obsess about words as much as I do, it's hard to pick a favorite. It's like Batman picking his favorite criminal lowlife. How do you choose between the Joker, Two Face, the Penguin, and the scum who killed your parents? It's just too painful.
But what the heck, here's a good candidate, and it's also exhibit Q in the case of why I love the Dictionary of American Regional English: peedoodle.
Continue reading...
During President Obama's health care summit last week, Republican House Whip Eric Cantor suffered a bit of a misspeak, saying: "We have a very difficult bridge to gap here." Whoops! It's the gap that needs bridging, of course, not vice versa.
Continue reading...
You're right on the money if you guess that this month's Lounge has something to do with nouns. Specifically, we've been digging up data on these very three nouns — person, place, thing — as a result of hearing a news snippet on the radio a few weeks ago, when a speaker characterized a situation as "a Kumbaya thing." Huh? What exactly is a Kumbaya thing?
Continue reading...
Sign up now (it’s free!)
Whether you’re a teacher or a learner,
Vocabulary.com can put you or your class
on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.