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Articles from 2013
Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Ten Words from "The NY Times" - July 3, 2013
Ten Words from "The NY Times" - July 3, 2013
Learn Ten Words from The NY Times - July 3, 2013. Then see "Vocabulary Begets Vocabulary: The More You Know, the More You Learn" to understand why learning these words will help you absorb even more as you read.
Topics:
Vocabulary
Lexicographer Hugh Rawson died recently. Among other accomplishments, he wrote Rawson's Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk, a monumental, essential look at euphemisms that every language-lover should own. I can't recommend it enough.
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Blog Excerpts
Word on the Street: New Wall Street Journal Column
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, has been writing a language column for the last couple of years for The Boston Globe (and before that for The New York Times Magazine). Now he is starting a new language column for The Wall Street Journal called "Word on the Street." Each week he will focus on a word in the news and examine its history. In his first column, he looks at how cyber is showing up with increasing frequency as a noun. Check it out here.
Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
List of the Week: Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club"
Supplement "The Joy Luck Club" with Tan's personal essay, "Mother Tongue"
Check out five new interactive Vocabulary Lists based on Common Core text exemplars The Joy Luck Club and "Mother Tongue," by Amy Tan.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Words in the Courtroom, from Mobspeak to "Argle-Bargle"
American courtrooms can produce some fascinating linguistic specimens. Two high-profile court cases have put language on display. In Boston, the trial of mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger has provided testimony full of old-school crime lingo. Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion on the Defense of Marriage Act featured some "legalistic argle-bargle."
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Vocabulary Shout-Out: Scott Shane for "Bedeviled"
A word to use when not assigning blame.
In chronicling WikiLeaks' involvement in the unfolding Edward J. Snowden affair, Scott Shane, who is the national security reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, made use of the word bedevil in "Offering Snowden Aid, WikiLeaks Gets Back in the Game."
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Topics:
Vocabulary
"How long did you have to queue up?" I asked my brother about a concert he'd attended, just after I got back from a trip to the UK. "You're back in America now, Shannon," he teased me. "We don't queue up here, we line up!" He had a point, but I'd like to think my word choice was not merely the result of my Anglophile tendencies.
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