Culture | In a Word
‘Slithy,’ ‘chortle,’ and other portmanteau wordsLewis Carroll is credited with memorable portmanteau words, including “slithy”: a combination of “slimy” and “lithe.”
Either a ‘lender’ or a ‘loaner’ you can beWords are not Platonic ideals with a separate existence. In language usage, fashion plays a crucial role.
How language describes, but also changes, the worldThe officiant at a wedding says, “I hereby declare you married,” and that utterance plays a crucial role in making it so.
A ‘nerd’ can be a ‘geek’ and also a ‘wonk’The word "nerd" originated comparatively recently, in 1950, in Dr. Seuss’ “If I Ran the Zoo.” But the concept of nerdity has a long history.
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The nuances of ‘coup,’ ‘mutiny,’ and ‘insurrection’"Insurrection" and "rebellion" imply wider participation – ordinary people, rather than members of the elite or a military unit, are the drivers.
All CAPS or none: It’s a free-for-all on social mediaWRITING EVERYTHING IN ALL CAPS IS GENERALLY UNDERSTOOD AS YELLING, our language columnist notes.
Ruling out overindulgence in capital lettersPeople don't seem to know what – or when – to capitalize. It's a problem that streches back thousands of years.
Humans, not chatbots, find capitalization trickyEarly European manuscripts don’t differentiate between uppercase and lowercase letters; all letters are the same size and come in only one shape.
English has many rules, some of them validSome rules of English you know, some you don’t, and – despite what you might have been taught in grammar school – some aren’t rules at all.
Spelling tricks from the days before autocorrectIn the Middle Ages, "proper" spelling was not a cultural aspiration. People wrote words down as they pronounced them.
The words we keep having to GoogleAccording to one tally, the word that prompts the most spelling-related Google searches, by a huge margin, is "restaurant."
Why spelling well is a multilingual taskAround 60% of words in spelling bees from 1996 to 2014 derived from Latin and French, about the same proportion as in English as a whole.
Why England has 200 countesses – and zero countsThere are many – countless? – counts in the rest of Europe, but in Britain the husband of a countess is an earl. Scholars disagree about why.
When a peer is not necessarily one's equalThere were no English dukes until 1337. Up until then, the English referred to the grandest aristocrats with the good old Germanic word "earl."
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