Last week, we discussed the Worst Words of 2012. We were originally inspired by past lists from Lake Superior State University in Michigan. Every year they compile words that were misused, overused, and abused, and this week they released their list for 2013, which included some choice words that we had overlooked: CONTINUE READING »
2012 has been an interesting time in the life of our lexicon. From new coinages to new usages, English has had a nice growth spurt. Some neologisms quickly outgrow their usefulness, or through overuse, they become meaningless, like an overplayed song on the radio. Here are a few terms that many people have grown tired of in 2012. CONTINUE READING »
Imagine you’re sitting in a high school biology class or a college chemistry lab. The professor is giving a heated lecture using a whole host of long, difficult words. But every time she says “heterogeneous mixture” or “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle” she spells out the entire term one letter at a time. That’s what life is like for deaf students and professionals in the sciences. CONTINUE READING »
You may recall that last year we selected a rare word, a tongue-twister of sorts, as the 2011 Word of the Year: tergiversate which means “to change repeatedly one’s attitude or opinions with respect to a cause, subject, etc.; equivocate.” Rather than pick a word that rose to prominence through common usage during the year (like Occupy or Arab Spring), we selected a word hidden in the dictionary that encapsulated an overall quality of 2011. CONTINUE READING »
You may recall last year our editors selected an unusual, rare word, a tongue-twister of sorts as the 2011 Word of the Year. We picked tergiversate which means “to change repeatedly one’s attitude or opinions with respect to a cause, subject, etc.; equivocate.” CONTINUE READING »
11 is a very odd number and has been subject to much interpretation over the ages. According to Yahoo! News, medieval scholars believed that while most numbers had positive and negative qualities, the number 11
represented pure evil. Find out what “eleven” literally means here. CONTINUE READING »
As Halloween quickly approaches, Frankenstorm is sneaking up on the East Coast. Forecasters are calling the hurricane headed for New York, New Jersey, and as far inland as Ohio, “Frankenstorm” because (like the monster in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus) this storm is stitched together from three different weather systems CONTINUE READING »
To whom it may concern:
Over the past 200 years written use of the pronoun whom has declined by half, and half again over the last 50. It makes sense. In the colloquial world of email and texting, thinking about the correct usage of whom can just slow writers down. CONTINUE READING »
From Dr. Doolittle to Jane Goodall, human-animal communication has occupied our thoughts both in fiction and in reality. Dogs recognize their names when they are called; researchers have successfully taught primates to communicate in sign language; and the famed African gray parrot, Alex, built a vocabulary of over 100 English words out of which he learned to form cogent sentences. All of these examples show humans reaching out to communicate CONTINUE READING »
From the California dance band !!! to MIA spelling out her name in dashes, musical artists seem to love putting symbols in their names. Perhaps none more notable than pop star, Ke$ha who differentiates herself with a single letter substitution. CONTINUE READING »
