words
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Lexicon Valley Now In Written Form
Slate‘s language podcast, Lexicon Valley, now has a blog component, by popular demand. (Surprise, surprise—word nerds want to read more.) So far, it’s mostly cross-posts from the always-wonderful Language Log on the topics of slang, translation, and the word meh. We look…
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These Words All Have Neoflects Coming Off Them
Did you know that, like aglets for the end of a shoelace or tittle for the dot atop an i, there’s a whole delightful host of terms for the visual cues used in comic strips? Invented chiefly by cartoonist Mort Walker in a…
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Organic Keeping-on
Mental Floss’s brief history of the term “OK” is more than just all right. Using Allan Metcalf’s OK: The Improbably Story of America’s Greatest Word as a source, it covers not only the term’s birth, but also how it went the…
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The End of a World as We Know It
My obsession with Pluto began when my six-year-old daughter asked how many planets there were. Nine. Nine! Nine? There had always been nine, and I couldn’t bring myself to say “eight.”
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From “Beef-Witted” to “Zafty”
The lists of obscure vocabulary passed around among word nerds can get kind of repetitive (we all know what “schadenfreude” means by now, thanks very much), but this one from Death and Taxes is great the whole way through. It catalogs “18…
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The Evolution of Language
How did humans learn to talk, anyway? Vervet monkeys use different words (or, at least, “different alarm calls to refer to different types of predators, such as snakes and leopards”) but don’t arrange them into diverse kinds of sentences. Songbirds,…
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Does My Word Sound Big?
Have we been overlooking sound symbolism? Recent studies have shown that humans connect certain sounds with sensory perceptions and thus, the sound of a word could hint at its meaning. This article addresses how the idea fits into theories on…