Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from August, 2014
Vocabulary Shout-Out
In Karen Joy Fowler's Novel, Words are Part of the Story
A human-chimpanzee bond sheds light on what communication truly means
In a review for the New York Times Sunday Book Review of Karen Joy Fowler's "readably juicy and surreptitiously smart" We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Barbara Kingsolver describes the novel as "a story of Everyfamily in which loss engraves relationships, truth is a soulful stalker and coming-of-age means facing down the mirror, recognizing the shape-shifting notion of self." She might have added that it is an excellent read for anyone interested in words.
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We have another Euphemism of the Year candidate—and perhaps an entirely new category. In reference to her impending divorce, singer Jewel called the event a tender undoing, apparently seeking to create a more gibberish-soaked term than conscious uncoupling, which Gwyneth Paltrow famously used to describe her own divorce.
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Blog Excerpts
Why You'll Be Able to Play "Qajaq" in Scrabble
The new edition of the official Scrabble dictionary is being released, and with it come 5,000 new words that North American players will be able to make with their tiles. There are helpful two-letter words like DA, GI, PO, and TE, but perhaps most interesting are such oddities as QAJAQ and QUINZHEE. It turns out those are both Inuit words, included because the Canadian Oxford Dictionary is one of the sources. Read all about it in the National Post here.
Announcements
Common Sense Media Names Vocab.com "Best of 2014"
We're proud to be the only teen-focused app on their list
Common Sense Media selected Vocabulary.com last week as the only app for teens to make their "Best of 2014 (So Far)."
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Vocabulary.com News
In a piece for Politico, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives Steve LaTourette cited the Vocabulary.com blurb for grifter when he used that term to describe an arm of the Republican party. Politics aside, grifter is a great word and we're glad to see it getting some play.
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Last week, as part of the Lexicon Valley podcast, I talked about how the word discombobulate grew out of a vogue in the Jacksonian era for making up jocular polysyllabic words with a pseudo-classical air. That impulse for concocting silly-sounding sesquipedalianisms has often bubbled up in the history of English.
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Language LoungeA Monthly Column for Word Lovers
There's Something Fishy (and Corny and Cheesy) About the "-Y" Suffix
A peculiar feature of some adjectives ending in -y is their ability to take on a semantic life of their own, separate from the meaning of their root. A handful of food-based adjectives fit this pattern, in which an English learner would be at a great disadvantage in thinking that the adjective's meaning might be composable from its parts. Think of corny, meaty, fishy, and cheesy.
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