Vocabulary.com Blog Contributor
Mike Pope
Mike Pope has been a technical writer and editor for nearly 30 years. He has worked at Microsoft and Amazon, and currently works at Tableau Software. You can read more at Mike's Web Log and Evolving English II.
In a comical scene in the film The Princess Bride, the character Inigo Montoya has finally had enough of hearing the bad guy Vizzini say "Inconceivable!" when things are not only conceivable, but just keep happening. Montoya is finally moved to say, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Stormy Weather: A Tempest of Meteorological Terms
From tornado to cyclone and even haboob.
Given how much our day-to-day lives are influenced by weather — and especially by storms — perhaps it's not surprising that we have a rich vocabulary for these natural phenomena.
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There are all sorts of words in English based on the -onym word part, which derives from a Greek word that means name. Everyone knows about homonyms and synonyms, but what about retronyms, demonyms, and aptonyms?
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What does a Hanseatic city have to do with America's most popular sandwich? How is the city of Mozart related to a ballpark favorite? And how did the names of these cities end up as common and productive English words? It's all because of Americans' love for an ethnic food that's so much a part of our diet that we might not even realize it's ethnic: namely, German cuisine.
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A friend of mine recently alerted me to an odd type of "word." See if you can guess what the following mean:
• l10nContinue reading...
• i18n
• d11n
Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
"Did You Mean...?": When Ambiguity Foils Communication
Does "semiannual" mean twice a year or every two years? And other stumpers.
In day-to-day discourse, we don't usually encounter terms that are genuinely problematic. If someone throws something at us that's clearly wrong, like calvary for cavalry, we still get it. If my dialect is "She took a cake to the party," whereas yours is "She brought a cake to the party," I'll still understand you.
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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
The Terms of Christmas, Present
Christmas classics have injected many words and phrases into the language.
My wife and I were out Christmas shopping last week and came home with an armload of classic holiday DVDs that we somehow didn't already own. She'd gathered up every title you probably know, and we spent a couple of evenings watching our way through the pile. During this latter-day review of the holiday favorites of our childhood, it struck me that there were a surprising number of terms and phrases that had become familiar either directly from these Christmas classics or from their sources.
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