Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from March, 2015
Are you headed to Houston for the 70th annual conference of ASCD (Mar. 21-23)? So are we! Come visit us at the Exhibit Show at Booth #455, where we'll be having fun with the Vocabulary.com Challenge and giving away prizes. And on the morning of Monday the 23rd, our director of curriculum development, Georgia Scurletis, will be making a presentation on "Vocabulary Instruction in the Age of Blended Learning" (Level 3, Room 372B, 8–9 am).
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The Cues and Clues of Sub-Branding, from Cabin Class to Apple Watch
Earlier this month, Apple pulled back the curtain on its new wrist-borne technology, the Apple Watch. Much of the subsequent chatter centered on pricing ($349 to $17,000), features (digital crown, sapphire crystal), and release date (April 24). Some of us, however, directed our curiosity elsewhere: to the device's three model names. Why "Watch," "Watch Sport," and "Watch Edition"? What do those spare yet evocative names tell us about Apple's objectives?
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We love dramatic vocabulary moments in film and fiction, like this one in Veronica Roth's Insurgent, the second novel in the Divergent series, and we can only hope this dramatic introduction of the definition of insurgent (complete with part of speech!) it will make it into the Insurgent movie, coming to theaters this week.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
When the Academy Awards were given out last month, entertainment news was full of commentary about which movies, directors and performers should have been nominated but weren't—who got snubbed by those snobs in the Academy. That made me wonder if snub and snob were etymologically related.
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In a recent post on his LinkedIn blog, Emotional Intelligence 2.0 co-author Dr. Travis Bradberry listed some of the factors that contribute to EQ, or emotional intelligence. What's at the top of the list of factors indicating you might have high EQ? "You Have a Robust Emotional Vocabulary," Dr. Bradberry writes.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
They could have called it a dustup. A run-in. Fisticuffs. A kerfuffle. (Or even the sequipedalian batrachomyomachia.) But the BBC chose to use fracas in describing the event that led to the the suspension of Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson, sending many of us to our dictionaries with the question, "What does that mean?"
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On the latest installment of Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I look at the roots of the festive word carnival, associated with pre-Lenten celebrations around the Christian world. Some scholars speculate that the true origins of carnival actually lie in pagan rituals predating Christianity.
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