Tag archives: idioms
March Madness: The Elite Eight
We’re back with Round 2 of the Oxford Dictionaries Bracket Challenge, and the competition is heating up. Saved by the bell, an expression I always assumed to have originated from a high school colloquialism thanks to the ubiquity of my favorite Saturday morning sitcom of yesteryear, trounced the formidable rough and tumble with an impressive [...]
Slappers and dumb blondes: why we should care about language
With International Women’s Day being celebrated today, and US talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s controversial description of women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke as a ‘slut’ still causing uproar, journalist and writer Anne Sexton looks at the long and inglorious history of the word ‘slut’, and explains why gender-neutral language is still a hot topic. Is [...]
The Madness of March and the Oxford Dictionaries Bracket Challenge
March Madness, the single elimination college basketball tournament, is upon us. All month long, the top 68 teams in the US will duke it out in a series of rounds—some of which are remarkable feats in and of themselves, like the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four—for the NCAA Division I championship title. Oftentimes [...]
Word in the news: a chink in the armor
A lesson on the perils of saying what you don’t mean Recently, followers of US basketball got a stark reminder that words often have connotations which stretch beyond our intentions when using them. An editor for ESPN’s mobile website was dismissed from his position for using the phrase a chink in the armor in a [...]
Lights, camera, lexicon: the language of films in the OED
Film, that great popular art form of the twentieth century, is a valuable window on the evolving English language, as well as a catalyst of its evolution. Film scripts form an important element of the Oxford English Dictionary’s reading programme, and the number of citations from films in the revised OED multiplies with each quarterly [...]
Watch out for the birdie?
…an accountant found guilty of sending a “menacing tweet” was the victim of a legal “steamroller” that threatened to make the law look silly… The Telegraph 8 February 2012 What comes into your head when you see the words ‘menacing’ and ‘tweet’ side by side, as in the above? It initially struck me as being [...]
“The Dickens, reminiscent of Charles”: Boz and the language of hip-hop
“As the plot thickens, it gives me the dickens, reminiscent of Charles…” So unfolds the narrative in “SpottieOttieDopaliscious”, from OutKast’s 1998 album Aquemini, a cornerstone of late 90s southern hip-hop and one of my favorites. Last week, I listened to Andre utter these lyrics once again, and I wondered, what does it really mean to [...]
A look at Australian English past and present
The 26th of January is Australia Day. In this post, we look at Australian English. Professor Bruce Moore, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, Australian National University , has this to say about Australian English in an article on the OED website: Australian English differs from other Englishes primarily in its accent and vocabulary. [...]
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