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26 27 28 29 30 Displaying 190-196 of 233 Articles

Gift Words

Just in time for the holidays, Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters has rounded up a selection of gift-related words and phrases for his latest "Wordtastic" column in Good Magazine — covering everything from Seinfeldian "regifting" to "shopper's block." Read it here.

Early WOTY Nominees

The early nominations have been posted for the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year selection. ADS members who specialize in following language trends, including Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer, have submitted their lists of nominees. Read all about it here.

How We Got to "Hello"

Have you ever wondered why we say "hello" when we answer the telephone? Nate Barksdale of the think tank Cardus takes a long look at the history of the greeting here.

Collecting Collective Nouns

Twitter is becoming a great haven for wordplay. Check out the creativity on display in tweets marked with the hashtag #collectivenouns: "a knot of string theorists," "a sneer of critics," "a wunch of bankers," "a seemingly empty room of ninjas." The website All Sorts is collecting the results of this collective online experiment.

More on "Text(ed)"

Exploring a topic discussed here back in April, the British linguist John Wells considers how people are forming the past tense of the verb "to text" (often pronounced, like the present tense, as "text"). Read about it on Dr. Wells's phonetics blog here.
From the blogosphere comes news that President Obama's name has become an eponym, but not in English. In Japanese, Obama has transformed into obamu — a verb that means, according to one blogger, "to ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities." Continue reading...

The Language of Food

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky has launched a fascinating new blog called The Language of Food. So far he's posted meticulous studies of the words entrée, ketchup, and dessert. Check it out here.
26 27 28 29 30 Displaying 190-196 of 233 Articles
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