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Increase your vocabulary!…
If, as Dr. Johnson suggested, “Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language,” Wordnik is a veritable Santa’s sack… One can watch the language evolve before...
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“Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio”*…
source The ever-illuminating Jason Kottke dips into Statistical Reasoning for Everyday Life (Bennett, Briggs, and Triola; Addison Wesley Longman; Second Edition, 2002) for a measure of Shakespeare’s...
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Deliciate in the ludibrious…
source From MatadorAbroad, a heart-felt plea: “20 Obsolete English Words that Should Make a Comeback.” Read it and kench! As we scribble in the margins of our dictionaries, we might recall that it was...
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“If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing”*…
… one of hundreds of evocative entries in Greg Borenstein‘s wonderful Dictionary of Fantastic Vocabulary. * Henry Hazlitt ### As we contemplate coinage, we might spare a thought for George Joseph...
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”‘Opsimath’: a person who begins to learn late in life”*…
Fun with words: dive into the Twitter thread… * Merriam-Webster Dictionary (entry for March 30) ### As we enlarge our lexicons, we might spare a thought for Noël François de Wailly; he died on this...
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“To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, “I wish I had known...
“Irony” is a term that everyone uses and seems to understand. It is also a concept that is notoriously difficult to define. Much like Winona Ryder’s character in the 1994 rom-com “Reality Bites,”...
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“Words of nuance, words of skill/Words of romance are a thrill/Words are...
We know them by their words… For some stars, a big vocabulary is priceless. Singer-songwriters from Patti Smith to Nick Cave have built careers with songs whose rich language is as important as the...
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“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple”*…
Putting it as simply as possible… Try explaining something difficult or complex using only the most common thousand—sorry, ten hundred—words [the list is here]. The Up-Goer Five Text Editor isn’t a...
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“Roget’s Thesaurus is an oddball philosophy of language masquerading as a...
Austin Kleon on Roget’s Thesaurus… I have always assumed — and maybe you have, too — that a thesaurus is just a synonym dictionary, the words arranged alphabetically with a list of synonyms and...
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