This American like
We listened while driving, and every like, well, it like hung in the air in the car, and we couldn’t even open the windows because it was so hot outside. I mean seriously, seriously hot.
The plurals of Prius
“A current television commercial for the Toyota Prius avows, aloud and on the screen, that ninety percent of ‘Prius’ are still on the road. Toyota must be reluctant to use its chosen plural form, the ungainly Prii.”
W3, another controversy
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is again a source of controversy.
Michiko Kakutani, “messy” watch
The word appears again.
Words I can live without
We can do better than a word that associates teaching with dogma, pedantry, and servitude.
Help for DARE
The Dictionary of American Regional English must be feelin’ its keepin’.
The World in Words
A good podcast, from Public Radio International.
Word of the day: roach
“His hair is roached.”
7 Little Words
A lovely little diversion, challenging enough to provide at least slight difficulty here and there, easy enough to solve in a minute or two.
AFK
AFK? I had to look it up.
Bizspeak
Bryan Garner offers a Bizspeak Blacklist.
Word of the day: loggerhead
The OED: “An iron instrument with a long handle and a ball or bulb at the end used, when heated in the fire, for melting pitch and for heating liquids” (1687).
No more homework
“Homework” is not beneath me. But the word has, to my mind, little or nothing to do with college.
The front end
It is still called “the front end.”
How to improve writing (no. 42)
“The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you — unlike any other schooling that you have ever known before.”
Word of the evening: flip
As with last week’s Downton Abbey, American English leads the way.
Downton Abbey stuff
The young Crawleys are a colloquial avant-garde.
Two-word utterances of my adolescence
No way, &c.
Diction levels, crisscrossing
Tornadic activity, you guys.
“Silent film effect”
A baffling answer in today’s New York Times crossword, 32-Down, “Silent film effect”: IRISIN.
Lance Armstrong cheats with cheat
“Someone who cheats even when it comes to defining what it means to cheat is, well, a real cheater.”
Word of the evening: hobbledehoy
“I have no time for training young hobbledehoys”: Mr. Carson, in tonight’s episode of Downton Abbey.
Garner covers 2012
Bryan Garner collects some news of the year in language and writing.
Variety language
STICKS NIX HICK PIX.
Avoiding and averting
Which word applies to fiscal cliffs?
Review: The Story of Ain’t
The Story of Ain’t examines what David Skinner says might be “the single greatest language controversy in American history,” the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, the sequel to the 1934 second-edition Webster’s New International.
Sharked up
“The technical term to describe this sort of quick and undiscriminating effort: sharked up .”
Bryan Garner on snoot
Bryan Garner glosses David Foster Wallace’s “snoot .”
Stepping in it
Harry Frankfurt, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney.
Spellings of the future
Misspellings so strange that they must in fact be the spellings of the future.