Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2011
Blog Excerpts
How to Talk Super Bowl
The Pittsburgh Steelers meet the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl this weekend, and the Washington Post has a guide to Pittsburgh and Wisconsin lingo. Steelers fans might say, "Redd up the house, company's comin!" A Packers touchdown might be greeted with "Uff-da!" Read all about it here.
Blog Excerpts
From Smashmouth to Ground & Pound
In advance of the Super Bowl, Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer tackles the aggressive lingo of football in his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine. Read the column here, and listen to sportswriters discuss the column on Slate's "Hang Up and Listen" podcast here (starting at 33:30).
Last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Delaware English professor Ben Yagoda wrote about the clunky prose style he noticed in his students' compositions, including "a boom in Britishisms." Now Yagoda has created a wiki page to keep track of Britishisms creeping into American usage. Here is what Yagoda has collected so far.
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In this special edition of Evasive Maneuvers, our euphemism-meister Mark Peters reviews a new book on verbal evasions, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms by Ralph Keyes. According to Keyes, euphemisms serve as "an excellent way to determine what we find embarrassing."
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A cold and brisk hello from snowy New York City! Winter is a great time to, as a friend of mine said, "Cozy down," at home and in the classroom. To that end, I've been knitting, reading and cooking a lot at home, and digging in with my kids to improve our practices at school.
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Tuesday night's State of the Union address by President Obama provided a fresh round of political phrase-making. As members of Congress went on a bipartisan date night, Obama called for investments to win the future and meet our Sputnik moment by doing big things. Here's a look at some of the memorable words and phrases that came out of the speech.
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Earlier this week, we interviewed Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson about their new book, Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools. One intriguing section of the book discusses how students from culturally diverse backgrounds can be assisted in developing academic vocabulary. Here we present an excerpt describing how one creative student approached learning SAT vocabulary via rap.
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