“Who, or Why, or Which, or What: A Global Gazetteer of the Instructive and Strange” by John Oldale – London and New-York, Particular Books (Penguin Group), 2011 The classic gazetteer is a numbing compilation of places: their names, their coordinates in an attendant...
Charity Publishes Dictionary For Remote Micronesian IslandersThe picturesque Atoll of Ulithi, located in the Central Pacific, is home to 700 islanders. These Micronesians live on a chain of coral islands a thousand miles east of the Philippines. Most have learned to read and...
created by mellennj | 1 year ago 182 views | 0 recommendations | 0 comments
So the undefinable Twitter is getting defined, in a dictionary. Yup, Twitter is being added to Collins English Dictionary as of this year complete with noun and verb tenses.So now when your mom asks you what exactly Twitter is you can skip the confusing explanation typically...
created by Truemorist | 2 years ago 329 views | 2 recommendations | 1 comment
So, Web 2.0 has been crowned the millionth word in the English language. Surprise, surprise. What were you expecting it to be? "Newspaper"? "“As expected, English crossed the 1,000,000 word threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am GMT. However, some 400 years...
created by Truemorist | 2 years ago | updated 2 years ago 615 views | 10 recommendations | 2 comments
Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary offers several definitions of the word, "pack." When it comes to members of the mainstream media and their treatment of the subject of Americans without health insurance, blogger Doug Ross found that one definition is most applicable: "A...
opinion by BMCWrites | 2 years ago 114 views | 0 recommendations | 0 comments
12-years ago in February 1997 the term "Dunkadelic" was created. Michael Jordan was in the prime of his career. Kobe Bryant and Allen Iverson were both rookies in the NBA. Shaquille O'Neal was playing in his first...
Board (bored?) gamers wanting to improve their Balderdash skills will want to check out the new words being added to the dictionary this year. There's about a hundred of them, many of which pertain to cooking for...
created by Rob Peters | 3 years ago | updated 3 years ago 3001 views | 12 recommendations | 32 comments
"It is the flat floor of the universe. The Quran views the earth as an equal, but opposite to the sky. Again there are seven similar earths. Some Muslims claim that Allah meant the seven layers of earth, which cannot be true because the Quran says similar earths. The...
"SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - Expect cheers among hardcore online game enthusiasts when they learn Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. Or, more accurately, expect them to "w00t."
"W00t," a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped...
created by AlanEvans | 4 years ago 276 views | 0 recommendations | 0 comments
At a public meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America held in Chicago, Erin McKean, Editor-in-Chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary 2e told the audience “We’re Googletudinous.” The occasion was an "open microphone" session where audience members...
Henry Kissinger once said:
"“For other nations, Utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.”"
This sounds like a nice sentiment but perhaps Kissinger should have
chosen another word than horizon. As Mark Pattison, a...
In old movies you sometimes see the reporter elbowing his way
through the crowd with a fedora on his head and stuck into the band of
the hat is a little sign “press.” These days we talk about the media more than the press
and this is appropriate because the news...
The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English defines destination as:
"“a place to which a person or thing is going”"
This is in fact one of those examples of human laziness because this sense of destination is actually short for the phrase place of destination.
The...
To ponder something is to think about it. Although the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is for ponder as
a noun, the verb, as we use it, actually has a longer history. It
appears first in the written record in the late 1300s and not
surprisingly...
The other day I was listening to a radio piece about teenagers
driving, what with all the grad parties that had been going on. What
struck me was one cop’s description of impaired driving that extended
beyond driving drunk. She said drivers were sometimes...