Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
You don’t have to be an MD or a sick puppy to appreciate the enormous family of humorous medical terms, including ‘peanut butter balls’ (phenobarbitol), ‘horrendoplasty’ (an operation without a sunny forecast), or ‘duck’s disease’ (‘being short’, so-named for the non-NBA-ready stature of quackers).
The podictionary word of the week is “Anathema.”
Anatoly looks at the nickname “Hoosier”.
Test your wordpower against Oxford’s experts.
Ammon reflects on note-taking.
The podictionary word of the day is “mildew”.
Several times a year I speak on Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), a guest of Kerri Miller’s program “Midmorning News.” We usually advertise some general topic in advance, but, while I am in the studio, listeners are requested to ask any questions they like about word origins, regardless of the overarching theme. Sometimes I […]
David Crystal tells us that txtng is nothing worry about
Ammon Shea looks at Merriam’s madman.
It seems strange that in English we call W ‘double-U’ while in French its ‘double-V’. It’s usually written to resemble two Vs, rather than two Us. At Urbandictionary, the entry for W contains plenty of slurs against George Bush, and those who decided to have 3-Ws as the start of a web address.
Anatoly looks at the word “Buckeye”.
Several months ago, John McGrath of Wordie interviewed me for this blog. He asked me about my favorite words that I had come across in reading the OED and I gave him a list of what they were at the time. But words can be capricious things, and the ones of which I am fondest are constantly changing.
The OED refers to two men; Pliny and Nicander—in its etymology for the word magnet. Pliny was a Roman who lived in the 1st century and wrote the ‘Natural History’. Nicander was a Greek, who lived 300 years earlier. It’s very useful in figuring out how past peoples thought of the world around them.
Anatoly celebrates a word pioneer.
An excerpt from Ammon Shea’s Reading The OED.
Peters explores the vocabulary used on the show Futurama.