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“To coin a phrase”*…
Elliot Thornley nods to Shakespeare as the prodigious coiner of words (and phrases) that he was… And then reminds us that Jeremy Bentham was no slouch with a neologism himself… It’s pretty amazing....
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“Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They...
Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about “two-ness.” Sophie Hardach...
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“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor...
In an piece adapted/updated from his recent book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, Stefan Fatsis explores process(es) that determine our “Word[s] of the Year”…...
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“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to...
The estimable Robin Sloan on the challenge of keeping our language– our words and our use of them– up to the task of wrestling with our present and our future… The overloading of common words is well...
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“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”*…
“Obsolete (adj.): no longer in use or no longer useful”… Stefan Fatsis on the challenges faced by the purveyors of today’s dictionaries… In 2015, I settled in at the Springfield, Massachusetts,...
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“Algorithms are the culprits, influencers are the accomplices, language is...
On the occasion of the publication of his new book, Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language, Adam Aleksic — aka the “Etymology Nerd” — talks with Liz Mineo about how social...
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“I quit school in the sixth grade because of pneumonia. Not because I had it,...
At the other end of the spectrum are the kids who make it to– and in– the Spelling Bee. Sebastian Stockman shares his unique perspective… Every March, I get an email from Joan Lanigan at City Hall:...
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“Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss”*…
Satan, illustration by Gustave Doré from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. (source) What greater joy than that of creation? John Crace on the all-time champion coiner of English words… To many scholars he...
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“Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore”*…
From Greg Ross, a helpful vocabulary lesson for those of us who would talk about people’s relationships with books… rarissiman. extremely rare books, manuscripts, or prints In The Book Hunter (1863),...
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“Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of...
Jack Shepherd, in praise of phrases that persevere… I don’t want to sound too alarmist, but they walk among us. We thought they were dead, but they clung to life through a loophole, travelers from a...
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“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”*…
The Canting Academy is a classic linguistic guide to the criminal underworld of 17th-century London That seminal semanticist Samuel Johnson suggested, “dictionaries are like watches, the worst is...
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“One word brings another”*…
The Choice of Hercules by Carracci, 1596. Depicts Hercules deciding between Vice (right) and Virtue, or Arete (left) Recovering the wisdom of ancient Greece… … while actually dedicating years to...
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“Roget’s Thesaurus is an oddball philosophy of language masquerading as a...
Austin Kleon on Roget’s Thesaurus… I have always assumed — and maybe you have, too — that a thesaurus is just a synonym dictionary, the words arranged alphabetically with a list of synonyms and...
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“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words...
As we pivot into 2023 (Happy New Year!), a retrospective on the way that 2022– Ukraine, the economy, China, climate change, pivots at Facebook and Twitter, the lingering pandemic– changed our...
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“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple”*…
Putting it as simply as possible… Try explaining something difficult or complex using only the most common thousand—sorry, ten hundred—words [the list is here]. The Up-Goer Five Text Editor isn’t a...
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“I resemble that remark”*…
Swiss linguist and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure articulated the modern version of a belief that dates from Plato, and extended through Locke to modern linguistic scholarship… … that the letters...
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“The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a...
An Ernie Bushmiller “Cross Word Cal” cartoon, from Sunday New York World, 1925. Note how the animals are caged by letter length and genus — Source. Roddy Howland Jackson (himself a setter of puzzles)...
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“Words of nuance, words of skill/Words of romance are a thrill/Words are...
We know them by their words… For some stars, a big vocabulary is priceless. Singer-songwriters from Patti Smith to Nick Cave have built careers with songs whose rich language is as important as the...
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“One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible...
Here’s an ambiguous sentence for you: “Because of the agency’s oversight, the corporation’s behavior was sanctioned.” Does that mean, “Because the agency oversaw the company’s behavior, they imposed a...
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“There’s no such thing as an unabridged dictionary”*…
Write with a better dictionary. Modern dictionaries have lazy definitions that focus too much on simplicity at the cost of precision. Instead of using the default one on your computer, bookmark...
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