It’s prize time! Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The New Yorker has kindly made many of her stories available for free. Eleanor Catton won the Man Booker Prize, and the National Book Award finalists were announced (with free excerpts). CONTINUE READING »
“I coined a new word. How do I get it into the dictionary?”
This is, by far, the question lexicographers hear the most. People invent new words all the time, but which ones actually make it? CONTINUE READING »
Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1775, was the first comprehensive dictionary in English. Before this time, dictionaries were often glossaries of difficult words, neglecting more basic terms. CONTINUE READING »
American place names can sound pretty confusing even to native English speakers. From Philadelphia (Greek for “loving brother”) to Chicago (Algonquian Fox for “place of the wild onion”), the map of America is an etymological hodge-podge. For a clear example, take three adjacent states in New England. Vermont is an inverted, rough translation of the French for “green mountain,” mont vert. Massachusetts is derived from the name of the Native American people who lived CONTINUE READING »
In our research and general perusal, we’re lucky enough to encounter great original language analysis that we don’t always have the chance to fully explore in our blog. To bring these conversations to our readers, we’re introducing a new weekly series, “Around the Web,” which will collect and distill language news from–you guessed it–around the web. So here’s what was going on this week:
A few weeks ago, we discussed the -core suffix in relation to the word mumblecore. Today we’re going to take a look at another robust suffix born on the silver screen, -sploitation.
CONTINUE READING »
The fabulous gadgets of 007 and Ethan Hunt might be out of our price range, but the vocabularies of super spies are well within reach. Join us as we decode 9 terms from the world of espionage. CONTINUE READING »
Developmental linguists tell us that there are at least four distinct things that one must learn to acquire a language. We must know how to speak it and write it, we must know how to put words in correct order and – perhaps most importantly – we must know what the words mean. CONTINUE READING »
“The pursuit of Happiness” was thought to be an unalienable right by the writers of the US Declaration of Independence. However, in 1776, the definition of happiness evoked a different meaning than it does today. When the framers of this historic document wrote about “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” what exactly did they mean by “happiness”? CONTINUE READING »
Television has a habit of repurposing and repackaging common sayings into names of shows, from Three’s Company to Orange Is the New Black, and it’s easy to understand why: idioms are packed with rich associations that resonate instantly with viewers, and when applied to titles of the small screen, they quickly communicate the sensibilities of the shows they name. CONTINUE READING »
