Jun
17
Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week. [View the story "WotD Perfect Tweet Challenge - Week of June 10, 2013" on Storify] Thanks to everyone for playing! As always, to get the [...]
Jun
14
Welcome to this week’s Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news and culture. In language news, Russian’s most isolated dialect was found in Alaska. Phonemica, an open-archive, ethnographic project, is on a quest to preserve China’s languages. A study shows a [...]
Jun
13
Before Jane Austen, there was Fanny Burney. English writer Fanny Burney was born on this day in 1752. Known as Madame d’Arblay after she married, Burney wrote several novels and plays, as well as voluminous journals and letters. Jane Austen was a great fan, going as far as to derive the title of one of [...]
Jun
10
The Word of the Day Perfect Tweet Challenge is back! Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week. [View the story "WotD Perfect Tweet Challenge - Week of June 3, 2013" on Storify] [...]
Jun
10
The Portuguese got around. Starting in the 15th century, Portuguese sailors and navigators explored Africa, South America, Japan, China, India, and the Middle East. Eventually the country had established the Portuguese Colonial Empire, the “first global empire in history.” Inevitably Portuguese words worked their way into these cultures and eventually over to English, sometimes in [...]
Jun
5
SPOILERS GALORE TO FOLLOW. Have you recovered from Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones? We have, just barely, but not before losing our collective minds. We’ve recouped enough now to bring you our favorite words from this latest season of the show, just in time for this weekend’s season finale. Special thanks to the excellent [...]
May
31
Yesterday was all about the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Congratulations to 13-year old Arvind Mahankali of Bayside Hills, New York. Arvind won the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling knaidel, “a type of dumpling eaten by Jews during Passover.” Knaidel is Yiddish in origin by way of German, and after misspelling German words two years in a row, [...]
May
29
Tomorrow are the semi-final and final rounds of the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Talented orthographers aged 8 to 14 will be tasked with spelling difficult words such as last year’s winner, guetapens, or the winner from 2012, cymotrichous. However, many of us still have difficulty spelling even the simplest of words. We asked our [...]
May
22
It’s time for another installment of Word Soup Wednesday, in which we bring you some weird, funny, and interesting words from recent TV. l’affaire est ketchup Anthony Bourdain: “Across town [is] another thing entirely, the younger, wilder L’Affaire Est Ketchup, which I am reliably informed means ‘everything’s cool’ in local idiom.” “Quebec,” Parts Unknown, May [...]
May
15
This season wraps the eight-year run of the mockumentary about a little paper company. We’ve gathered our favorite words from the last season here. Belsnickel Dwight: “What about an authentic Pennsylvania Dutch Christmas? Drink some gluhwein, enjoy some hasenpfeffer. Enjoy Christmas with St. Nicholas’s rural German companion, Belsnickel?” “Dwight Christmas,” December 6, 2012 Belsnickel is [...]
