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Who put the extra $ in Ke$ha? Where did the $ come from?
From the California dance band !!! to MIA spelling out her name in dashes, musical artists seem to love putting symbols in their names. Perhaps none more notable than pop star, Ke$ha who differentiates...
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Could an animal speak? Not just bark or meow, but actually speak.
From Dr. Doolittle to Jane Goodall, human-animal communication has occupied our thoughts both in fiction and in reality. Dogs recognize their names when they are called; researchers have successfully...
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Whom: is this rare pronoun really dead?
To whom it may concern: Over the past 200 years written use of the pronoun whom has declined by half, and half again over the last 50. It makes sense. In the colloquial world of email and texting,...
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How the prefix “franken-” took on a life of its own. . .
As Halloween quickly approaches, Frankenstorm is sneaking up on the East Coast. Forecasters are calling the hurricane headed for New York, New Jersey, and as far inland as Ohio, “Frankenstorm” because...
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11/11: Why is today so special
11 is a very odd number and has been subject to much interpretation over the ages. According to Yahoo! News, medieval scholars believed that while most numbers had positive and negative qualities, the...
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What should the 2012 Word of the Year be?
You may recall last year our editors selected an unusual, rare word, a tongue-twister of sorts as the 2011 Word of the Year. We picked tergiversate which means “to change repeatedly one’s attitude or...
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Why “bluster” is our 2012 Word of the Year
You may recall that last year we selected a rare word, a tongue-twister of sorts, as the 2011 Word of the Year: tergiversate which means “to change repeatedly one’s attitude or opinions with respect to...
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How do you sign “heterogeneous mixture” to a deaf person?
Imagine you’re sitting in a high school biology class or a college chemistry lab. The professor is giving a heated lecture using a whole host of long, difficult words. But every time she says...
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The Worst Words of 2012
2012 has been an interesting time in the life of our lexicon. From new coinages to new usages, English has had a nice growth spurt. Some neologisms quickly outgrow their usefulness, or through overuse,...
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The words you want to banish in 2013
Last week, we discussed the Worst Words of 2012. We were originally inspired by past lists from Lake Superior State University in Michigan. Every year they compile words that were misused, overused,...
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Where do words come from? Do they really mean anything?
How do we use language? We use it to express ourselves through speech, to record our experiences or to invent and tell stories in writing. But before all that begins, before a word leaves our lips or a...
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Was Saussure wrong?
Welcome to the second installment in our series on Ferdinand de Saussure and the linguistic science of semiology. Now where were we? In the last post we discussed Saussure’s theory of the “sign” as a...
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Lexical Investigations: Appendix
A motley combination of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Germanic dialects, the English language (more or less as we know it) coalesced between the 9th and 13th centuries. Since then, it has continued to import...
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Why is the San Francisco football team called the 49ers?
When the California Gold Rush began in 1848, American football didn’t exist. But those aggressive gold miners would give their nickname to a football team one hundred years later. Gold was first found...
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Baltimore Ravens: The only football team named after a poem!
A lot of football teams are named after birds (e.g., the Philadelphia Eagles, the Atlanta Falcons), but of all our feathered mascots only one comes from a poem: The Baltimore Ravens. The dark American...
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When dictionaries are a matter of life or death…
Two recent events have raised the complicated question of whether or not dictionaries belong in courtrooms. A murder trial in Virginia was disrupted because the jurors illicitly consulted two...
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Lexical Investigations: Art
A motley combination of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Germanic dialects, the English language (more or less as we know it) coalesced between the 9th and 13th centuries. Since then, it has continued to...
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Are Scrabble tile values in need of an overhaul?
Invented by out-of-work architect Albert Butts during the Great Depression, Scrabble is a staple of word lovers’ lives. The popularity of this beloved game took off in the mid-1950s and has been an...
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The Value of Signs: Saussure’s rebuttal
We’ve reached the final installment of our series on Ferdinand de Saussure and the scintillating study of semiology. In our last post we left our friend Saussure in a rather unflattering light, when we...
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Lexical Investigations: Holistic
A motley combination of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Germanic dialects, the English language (more or less as we know it) coalesced between the 9th and 13th centuries. Since then, it has continued to import...
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