Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from October, 2015
Dept. of Word Lists
What Were the "Vocabulary Moments" of the First Democratic Debate?
Analyzing the candidates' rhetoric with Vocabulary.com's "word's-eye view."
Last night, the five Democratic candidates for president squared off in the first of their televised debates, moderated by CNN's Anderson Cooper. Frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her four challengers, Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb, and Lincoln Chafee, stated their cases to primary voters, and their rhetoric was crystallized in the vocabulary items they used. But what were their significant "vocabulary moments"?
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Dog EaredBooks we love
Eggcorns Finally Get Their Due in a Bountiful Book of Malapropisms
Mark Peters reviews Robert Alden Rubin's "Going to Hell in a Hen Basket"
Do you like sowing your wild oaks? Do you sometimes feel like a social leopard? Could you use a new leaf on life? Or do you just enjoy the infinite creativity of the English language, even when people make mistakes? If you answered yes to any of the above, you need to check out Robert Alden Rubin's terrific new book Going to Hell in a Hen Basket: An Illustrated Dictionary of Modern Malapropisms.
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Have you encountered a transition counselor lately? I hope not. In the real world, a transition counselor is a diabolical euphemism for a profession made famous by George Clooney's character in Up in the Air: someone who fires people for a living. But in Matt Kindt's extraordinary conspiracy thriller Mind MGMT, the term has an even darker sense: assassin.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Nothing's "Quixotic" About This School's Vocabulary Bowl Ambitions
If they can "dream the impossible dream," so can you!
This year's Vocabulary Bowl has just kicked off, and already one school has big dreams. A teacher celebrates his school's strong early showing with a video. We challenge you to watch it without smiling.
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Topics:
Vocabulary Bowl
Dept. of Word Lists
A Current-Events Mini Lesson: Trans-Pacific Trade
Teach Trans-Pacific Trade Using 10-Word Vocabulary List
Social studies teachers: For a current-events mini lesson on the historic Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement, check out our 10-word Vocabulary List, drawn from five key sentences in the New York Times article announcing the agreement.
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Announcements
The 2015-16 Vocabulary Bowl Kicks Off!
Preseason is over. Let the yearlong word learning competition begin.
Teachers, administrators, and students, it's go time! Following the September "preseason," the second annual Vocabulary Bowl officially kicks off on October 1st, 2015 and will run through April 30, 2016. If you aren't signed up to play yet, this is a great time to get in on the action.
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I live in the heart of a small lexical explosion—Boulder, Colorado, home to about 100,000 people (of whom 30,000 are university students), and about two dozen retail marijuana dispensaries. The lexical explosion is in the marketing vocabulary of a product that until recently, despite its being universally known and widely used, was contraband.
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