Each year, Lake Superior State University posts a list of words it believes should be banished from use because of “mis-use, over-use and general uselessness.” Here are my favorites from this year’s crop. Post-Truth — To paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we are entitled to our own opinions but not to our own […]
2016 Words of the Year
It’s that time when English dictionary companies name their Words of the Year, terms that encapsulate the previous year for them. Based on the choices, it appears that 2016 was not the best of times. Oxford Dictionaries named the term “post-truth,” an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are […]
Proofreading 101
I am continually amazed at the number of typos and other written errors I find. How could such mistakes happen? It’s easy because we read: The outside shapes of words, not the individual letters Words in phrases, not just individual words Words in context, not isolated from the sentence’s meaning. Specifically, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at […]
Word Play Masters
Word Play Masters does a contest each year whereby people take a word from the dictionary; alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter (and only one letter); and then supply a new definition. Fortunately, the organizers post entries all year round, so we do not have to wait for the “awards” to enjoy […]
Words of the Year
Good news. The choices for the 2015 “Word of the Year” are more varied than usual, and include a suffix and an emoji. Merriam-Webster picked the suffix “ism,” but not just any “ism.” The dictionary company named the words that had “earned high traffic spikes and big bumps in lookups on its website, specifically socialism, […]
Is “Said” Dead?
Is “Said” Dead? Evidently some teachers think it should be. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reported that some teachers were trying to purge their students’ compositions of words deemed vague or dull. As the Journal notes: “The goal is livelier writing. The result can be confusion.” The reason? For one thing, some […]
