The great folk-music pioneer Pete Seeger died on Monday at the age of 94. He's best known for such classics as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?," "If I Had a Hammer," and "Turn, Turn, Turn!" But we're particularly fond of a song that he performed about the irrationality of the English language, "English is Cuh-Ray-Zee."Continue reading...
Don't just learn Obama's State of the Union words. Learn the vocabulary the media's using to write about "State of..." addresses with this Quick Current Events Quiz: ten key words cropping up in this week's New York Times and Washington Post State of the Union/State coverage.Continue reading...
Add the words President Barack Obama's got everyone talking about to your vocabulary with a free, interactive Vocabulary List: Obama's State of the Union Address, 2014. Then check out Mark Liberman for Language Log of the words Obama likes to use the most.Continue reading...
As The New York Times wrote in an obituary for Pete Seeger, who died Monday, "folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action." Celebrate his legacy by learning vocabulary from his songs.
With the Super Bowl just around the corner, our own Ben Zimmer talked to Seattle's KUOW about the origins of some football language. Some of the terms, like "the 12th man" and "the Legion of Boom," have special resonance in Seattle, home of the Super Bowl-bound Seahawks.Continue reading...
Whether you're a football purist or just in it for the seven-layer nachos dip, here are some football-centric word learning resources, Super Bowl-style.Continue reading...
There's an assumption held by many that we're supposed to stop reading when we encounter words we don't know and look them up in the dictionary. Maybe our English teachers told us to do this. Maybe we read it in a self-help book. Maybe, in a fit of conscientious intention, we set it as a personal goal. But it's an awfully hard practice to keep up. Chances are we skip over them, riding the context wave as far as it will carry us. What if it turns out that this is actually the best way to go?Continue reading...