Law and Order and Urban Dictionary
That crowdsourced compilation of online slang you probably know is becoming a go-to resource for the courts. Is this reasonable, or terrible?
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"Let’s get this straight up front: I am now writing a blog post, not blogging a blog," writes Forrest Wickman at Slate, the good people who brought you the great two-spaces-after-a-period debate. Oh yes. Oh yes. They are at it again, this time with a post in which he takes on the matter of what to call this thing we do.
That crowdsourced compilation of online slang you probably know is becoming a go-to resource for the courts. Is this reasonable, or terrible?
You've heard of the book. You've heard of the major motion picture. But what's in a name, when the name is Gatsby? An investigation into the popularization of a word that is only sort of a word.
There is a change in the venerable Scripps National Spelling Bee, which will take place May 28 to 30 near Washington, D.C. Spelling is not enough. There's a vocabulary portion of the competition, now, too.
The most powerful state of emptiness in the written word is the humble space. Let us pause and honor it for a moment, as this particular moment provides us with yet another reminder of why we need the space so.
Linguist, lexicographer, and self-professed word nerd Ben Zimmer takes in an admirable amount of information daily, across all forms of media, new and old. It's not just about words.
A lengthy piece at Slate today by Matthew J.X. Malady delves into the question of why we humans insist on taking such pleasure in hating words so vociferously. But maybe we just hate words because it's fun.
Updates to dictionaries take place regularly enough that it seems like someone is always grumbling over this word or that phrase being included in the most esteemed place we think of words existing. But sometimes the lexicographers themselves are surprised by what they find.
Saturday is a big day. OK, the expression, is turning 174.
Outrage changes an apostrophe edict, and a group of Londoners are copy-editing the streets.
Grammar. In honor of its beauty and, more importantly, its usefulness to all of us, there is a National Grammar Day, a day that grammarians have been celebrating since 2008. How should a word-minded person celebrate?
Why do people insist on spelling certain words with more letters than is necessary on an inherently limited social media platform like Twitter? I turned to Tyler Schnoebelen, a recent PhD from Stanford who studies emotion in language, in hopes of gaining some clarityyy.
Men are wearing meggings — primarily, it seems, so they can write articles about men wearing meggings. Is this an all-new low in stunt-journalism, or an unprecented high in male fashion? Are meggings even a thing? We investigate.
Following its snobbish tradition of doing away with longstanding Internet-related terminology, the French government is replacing "hashtag" with "mot-diese" — to which we say... bravo!
The misused word is everywhere, proliferating like fruit flies 'round a bowl of rotting bananas. We must stop it before it goes too far.
In Sunday's New York Times there's an article that combines things relationship with things semantic. What in the world are you supposed to call the man or woman with whom you've been living with for the past 20 years — your de facto spouse — when you're not actually, officially married, and never want to be?
Tonight in the grand ballrooms of a Boston Marriott, linguists and language experts and word aficionados will gather to vote on the American Dialect Society's official Word of the Year. Will it be YOLO? Mansplaining? Fiscal cliff? Only time will tell, but for now ... a preview.
The cover of the November 2011 issue of Glamour featured Kristen Stewart, her toenails painted black and the slightest beginning of a smile (maybe?) on her face, surrounded by pitch lines, including this one: "12 Ways to Get Your Sh*t Together."
"Fiscal cliff," "spoiler alert," and "trending" beware: Michigan's Lake Superior State University has issued their list for the 38th year in a row.
Jen Doll rounded up the year's worst words today, setting one of our commenters off on a mini-rant about noun-ified verbs.
There is no better way for a semantic-minded person to remember the year than with those words we'd just as soon never write or see or hear spoken again. From "artisanal" to "curate," "gaffe" to "legitimate rape," and "meggings" to "ugh," here's our list.
Which were the best—most amusing, most mortifying, funniest, most cringeworthy, and most interesting—mistakes of the year? Herewith, our favorites.
Hark! Merriam-Webster has revealed another much anticipated word-of-the-year designation: the dictionary website's 10 most looked-up words of 2012.
You know what job recruiters are getting sick of hearing about? Your "creativity." LinkedIn has analyzed its 187 user profiles and mapped which buzzwords were the most overused in each country this year.
What happens when one NYU student replies to 39,978 others? Things go nuts, on TV, the Internet, and the world, and so on. Now it's transitioned into a handy anecdote on the state of how to use email.
In a shocking disclosure revealed by Alison Flood in the Guardian this week, the most venerable of dictionaries, the Oxford English, may be embroiled in quite the scandal. Or is it?
So ... if Tracy Morgan goes on a rant again and tells people that he'd stab and kill his son for being gay, the AP will just call it "anti-gay." And forget about "ethnic cleansing" and "Islamophobia" — those won't exist in the new stylebook either.
Dictionary.com has announced bluster as its 2012 Word of the Year. Yet we don't feel blustery. We dug in to find out what, exactly, makes a "word of the year." And, of course, included some WOTY suggestions of our own.
We know you're waiting to vote, among other bits and pieces of waiting. But as you're waiting in reportedly long lines, what exactly are you muttering in your mind, or tweeting to your followers, or posting on your Facebook page, or texting to your friends? On or in?
A Frankenword is a special kind of portmanteau we don't talk about all that much, but given Sandy (dubbed early on a "Frankenstorm"), it is again a topic of conversation, at least among certain semantically driven people.
In purely semantical terms, Sandy is whipping up some havoc, though of a less dangerous kind than what she's doing atmospherically. Here's a lexical exploration of some of the key storm-related words flying around.
Today is the day a certain set of language and literature fans celebrate Mr. Geoffrey Chaucer, who died 612 years ago today. Not only was Old Chaucey a pretty compelling writer, but also, he was far better at coining words and phrases than the rest of us amateur portmanteau-chasers.
Today in the New York Times' Opinionator blog there's a love letter of sorts from Ben Yagoda, author and professor of English at the University of Delaware, to the dash.
It is International Caps Lock Day, as Megan Garber has alerted us in her TheAtlantic.com post on the subject. This is a day to celebrate (if you must), but with some caveats. It's not like you can just hit the caps lock key with your pinkie and carry on. There are rules, here, even on its special day.
Prohibition be damned, words were just better in the 1920s. If you don't request extra foot juice tonight at that dive bar where you order the subpar pinot grigio, you are doing something wrong.
One clear lesson about language is that it's ever-evolving, but at the same time, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Take the case of whom.
Happy Dictionary Day, word-nerds! This is the official holiday in which we celebrate the birth of Noah Webster, who would be 254 years old if he were still living and breathing on this planet.
The New York Times' After Deadline blog has a noteworthy semantical discussion today in light of the presidential debates and all the fact-checking and talking about fact-checking that's guaranteed to keep happening until the election on November 6, and maybe afterward, too. Let us count the ways in which we incorrectly use the word fact.
Apropos of crutch words, apropos of despicable words, apropos of very word-world as we know it, there's another word rant that I must bring to your immediate attention. Really. Really! Really? Oh yes.
Misuses of words are fast and frequent and come in any number of varieties. They are not all the same. Here are a few of the most likely ways we confuse our words, with examples to learn from.
Britain's prime minister David Cameron has recently used the word butch in a sarcastic fashion to describe a Labour party leader as not good at his job, i.e., not masculine enough. What can we learn from this?
As we gathered punctuation favorites from a range of our favorite writers, novelists, and word knowledgable people, we ran into a cold, hard fact. Some punctuation marks were hated, perhaps none more vehemently than the exclamation point. It was a mark hated most of all by Grantland staff writer Rembert Browne.
Prepare yourself, people who love words and writing and those symbols we use to designate pauses and emotions and inflections (and such) throughout our prose and occasionally poetry as well. Monday is the annual holiday of National Punctuation Day!
Chickification: This is a term our dear friend Rush Limbaugh adores, considering it some sort of powerful way to demean women. But for having made it up, it's still rather unclear what it means. And why should we take his word for what chickification is?
The emoticon is old. Or, young, 30 years young! Either way, it's a bona fide grown-up symbol now, with the life experience under its lack of a belt (for it has no waist) to prove it.
Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast is always a font of linguistic information, but today's is particularly fun, more rebellious, you might say, than usual. It's not like we get to dissect a vulgarity or semi-vulgarity in a linguistic way every day!
It has come to our attention that there is a new habit we have been speedily, decadently embracing with regard to our words. We'll call it portmanteauing.
Here's a handy compendium of additional crutch words, those verbal (and sometimes written) pause words that we just can't seem to help using, even as we know we shouldn't. You know?
The New York Times' After Deadline blog contains a fantastic letter to the paper's editor from March of 1924 that reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same, copy-wise and otherwise.
Joe Biden said literally quite literally a lot last night, which was fodder for much semantic mockery around the Internet. If there's one thing moderately word-nerdy folks (folks, he said that, too) hate, it's the repeated and possibly improper use of one of those crutch words.
If the frequency of word usage "related to moral excellence and virtue" in the Google Books archive is to be believed, America is in a steep moral decline.
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