Word of the Day: lotusland
Lotusland is not a nice place to visit, precisely because to visit is to stay.
A new Fowler
Shades of Lynne Truss. I’m like, Oy.
Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner
Faulkner words, or better, Faulknerwords.
The gender-neutral hen
A new word in Swedish.
Word of the Day: expiate
“Expiate” is for me a William Faulkner word.
Erin McKean on how dictionaries work
“I truly believe that if something is used as a word, it’s a word. The rest is just bookkeeping.”
Word of the Day: sprachgefühl
“Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance.”
Rip and run
Omar robs drug dealers, but “rip and run” has a much broader meaning.
Word of the day: cento
The cento is dear to readers of modern and postmodern poetry.
From The Noun Project
The Noun Project aims to create “a visual language of icons anyone can understand.”
Acción Ortográfica Quito
Diéresis, Tilde, and Coma, correcting graffiti in Quito.
Raymond Carver on words and punctuation
“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.”
Remedy that?
“OH MY GOD YOU SHOULD REMEDY THAT IMMEDIATELY.”
Recently updated
More evidence that ending a sentence with “it” is acceptable.
Railing against vogue words
When I read or hear this sort of railing against words, I have greater sympathy for the exasperation with which linguists regard prescriptivist attitudes toward language. But not all careful thinking about one’s words is nonsense.
Word of the day: quotidian
I like the word quotidian. The word dailiness too.
A case for singular they ?
The painful repetition of singular pronouns isn’t the only alternative to “they.”
Domestic comedy
“Five-o!”
The libertine of the day
A good time to revisit the story of I, Libertine.
Words of the year
Culture, exposure, vape, #blacklivesmatter.
A house is not a home
I winced this morning to hear the newsreader at our NPR member-station refer to our new governor Bruce Rauner’s “nine homes.”
Our words, our selves
Barbara Wallraff: “With our words — particularly our written words, or words that we have written down before we say them — we can be our best selves, and even selves better than our actual best.”
Looking up salve
Even though the l is silent, the word must come from the Latin salvāre , no? Some idea of saving, healing, making whole, no? No.
Food and the dictionary
“The adoption of ethnic food words into English is an excellent proxy for the moment our culture embraces these foreign foodstuffs as our own.”
World’s most confusing sentence
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Ending a sentence with it
I’ve been told of other such rules: many students come to college believing that they must never begin a sentence with and, but, or because. The it-rule though is new to me.
“LEASH-CURB AND CLEAN UP”
“Non-native speakers are rightly confused by leash-curb, thinking it’s a genuine word, not realizing that it’s a matter of inept punctuation by someone who should know better.”
Jeepers, they’re euphemisms
Gee, jeeze, jeepers, sheesh.
Scott Pelley, phallologocentrist
“This post’s title is a joke, out of all proportion to the moment. But the language of ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ is absurdly out of date.”
To adjective, to adverb, to verb
From xkcd.