Posts by Katherine Connor Martin
What’s so super about Super PACs?
Back in January we published a short glossary of the jargon of the presidential primaries. Now that the campaign has begun in earnest, here is our brief guide to some of the most perplexing vocabulary of this year’s general election. Nominating conventions It may seem like the 2012 US presidential election has stretched on for [...]
Grexit, Spanic, and clown: July 2012 on the radar
Each month we reflect on some of the new words Oxford’s lexicography team has been tracking—words that are being used in English but are not yet sufficiently established for inclusion in our dictionaries. Would-be words of the eurozone crisis The Eurozone economic crisis which has dominated headlines this summer has yielded a bumper crop of [...]
Words on the radar: June 2012
Oxford Dictionaries adds dozens of new words each quarter but we have a much longer watchlist of words that we are monitoring for possible inclusion in the future. The following are some words which have recently come to our attention, but don’t yet have enough currency for us to include them in our dictionaries. Some [...]
Are you father-waur or father-better? The forgotten language of fathers
To judge by the typical Father’s Day gift, there isn’t much more to fatherhood than golf, grilling, and garish neckties. The history of the English language reveals some different and even surprising associations in some rare words and meanings alluding to the paternal parent. Some of these largely forgotten words may be worthy of a [...]
Boomerang vocabulary: words that return to their origins
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” may have been good advice for Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but it isn’t practical for a language. English is both an avid borrower (ballet, schmooze, wok) and a generous lender: consider German das Baby, French le week-end, and Japanese aisu kuriimu (‘ice cream’—try saying it out loud). Occasionally, [...]
Which words came to life 100 years ago? New words in 1912 from ‘ambivalence’ to ‘jazz’
On April 15, 1912, readers of the Los Angeles Times opened their papers to the headline “The World’s Greatest Steamship Wrecked.” Less than two weeks earlier, they had read something else of historical note, at least to etymologists: the April 2 edition contained the earliest citation yet found for the word jazz. At that time, [...]
From ‘trousers’ to ‘Tories’: unexpected Irish words in English
Most English speakers would not be surprised to hear that words like banshee or shamrock have their origins in Irish, the Celtic language (also known as Gaelic) which is still spoken in the parts of Ireland known as the Gaeltacht. After all, most recognizable Irish words encountered in English have obvious connections to Ireland, like [...]
What gets leapt in a leap year?
2012 is a leap year in the Gregorian calendar, making it an appropriate time to consider the origin of this rather puzzling term. After all, leap implies that something is being skipped over, but a leap year has an extra day, making it longer than an ordinary year, not shorter. Where is the metaphorical leap [...]
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