Articles Language Nerds Have Different Ideas About 2014’s Word of the Year Tasbeeh HerweesJan 13, 2015
Articles Fascinating: The Definitive Explanation of Why Gaddafi's Name Is Spelled So Many Ways Cord JeffersonMar 12, 2011
Articles Word Ma-Sheen: The Bi-Winning Warlock Injects Tiger Blood into the Lexicon On Charlie Sheen's linguistic acrobatics.Mark Peters06 Mar, 2011
Articles Screaming Yellow Zonkers! Green’s Dictionary is the Bible of Slang Hilariously subversive (or subversively hilarious), a new slang dictionary challenges the sanctity of language by helping us laugh at life.Mark Peters04 Mar, 2011
Articles Snowpocalypse! Blizzaster! We’re Buried in Snow-perbole The only thing more impressive than this winter's recent snowfall has been the hyperbolic language we've used to describe it.Mark Peters23 Feb, 2011
Articles The History of the Word Rape The recently abandoned Republican efforts to distinguish between "rape" and "forcible rape" sheds light on the word's perceived shades of gray.Mark Peters13 Feb, 2011
Articles Chicago-Style: Backroom Deals, Deep-Dish Pizzas, and Assorted Slurs Using "Chicago-style" as a signifier of corruption is nothing new, but does the phrase also insinuate something "un-American" about cities?Mark Peters11 Feb, 2011
Articles The Joy of Indefinite Words: Is a Spillion More than a Metric Buttload? How many iotas are in a bazillion? Is a jot more than a whit? How does a gazillion compare to a kabillion?Mark Peters03 Feb, 2011
Articles Lions and Tigers and Vampire Squids, Oh My! When Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs as a "vampire squid," he created a monster of a word for corporate bloodsuckers.Mark Peters27 Jan, 2011
Articles Job-Killing: Republicans' Blank-Blanking Pejorative Du Jour A look at the history of budget-busting, job-killing, and other variants of mud-slinging malarkey.Mark Peters20 Jan, 2011
Tofu vs. Hotdog: Charting the Evolution of the American Diet Over Time With Google's Latest Gadget Google Labs has just released the Google Books N-Gram Viewer, and it is fun!Nicola Twilley16 Jan, 2011
Articles Let's Bury the Not-a-Word Myth Turns of phrase like "irregardless," "prolly," and "imma" can be cringeworthy, but that doesn't mean they aren't words.Mark Peters12 Jan, 2011
Articles Legacy: Formerly Regal Word Turned Euphemism for Aged Leftovers How "legacy" became our era's most over-the-top euphemism for a something between a bingo room and the grave (and landmines).Mark Peters20 Dec, 2010
Articles How “Geek” Became Chic From The Social Network to The Walking Dead, geeks are everywhere in pop culture these days. But what are the roots of this suddenly hip pejorative?Mark Peters16 Dec, 2010
Articles Is It OK to Say "Gay"? If "gay" can mean both "homosexual" and "lame," does it make us homophobic to use it for the latter? A discussion of a controversial word.Mark Peters18 Nov, 2010
Articles Re:Words: A Video Lexicon Explores the Beauty of Language Through Youtube A new crowdsourced video by the directors of "Words" explores the complexity of our language.Kyla Fullenwider12 Nov, 2010
Articles Adopt an Obsolete Word from the Oxford English Dictionary Oxford English Dictionary Lets You Save the Words The storied dictionary is trying to rescue forgotten words and bring them back into use. Do your part by adopting a word of your own.Siobhan O'Connor03 Nov, 2010