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Lexical Investigations: Sustainability 27 Aug 2013 | 12:00 pm
This may come as a surprise, but the link between sustainability and environmentalism is actually fairly recent. Before 1980, sustainability was an uncommon variant of sustainable, as in “capable of b...
Why do people end sentences with “so”? What effect does it have on conversation? 21 Aug 2013 | 12:00 pm
Welcome to Part II of our discussion on the word so. Last week we explored the sentence-initial so, and today we’ll be looking at ending sentences with so—a phenomenon called “the dangling so.” Despit...
Lexical Investigations: Soul mate 20 Aug 2013 | 12:00 pm
Though the phrase soul mate gained steam toward the end of the twentieth century, the idea goes all the way back to Plato’s Symposium, written in 385–380 BCE. In Symposium, when the two dialogists dis...
Learning to Read with Zoo Animals 16 Aug 2013 | 12:00 pm
Few things are as empowering as a deep and robust vocabulary. As poet and lexicographer Wilfred Funk put it, “The more words you know, the more clearly and powerfully you will think… and the more idea...
Lexical Investigations: Fiat 13 Aug 2013 | 12:00 pm
The origin of the word fiat in English is connected to the origin of the world itself. Taken from the Latin meaning “let it be done,” this word appears in the Latin translation of Genesis, the first b...
Welcome to the new Thesaurus.com 12 Aug 2013 | 12:00 pm
We are pleased to announced a reimagined writing tool on Thesaurus.com. Since Dr. Peter Mark Roget created his monumental thesaurus in 1852, few have reevaluated how we consider synonymy in English. A...
Do you use “so” to manage conversations? 9 Aug 2013 | 12:00 pm
Over the last few years, lovers of language have casually observed an increase in speakers beginning sentences with the word so. What are some new ways in which so is being used in colloquial speech, ...
Lexical Investigations: Stuff 6 Aug 2013 | 12:00 pm
As a noun and a verb, the word stuff has had many lives, dating all the way back to the 1300s. The sense of wool and cloth is chiefly British. In the nineteenth century, a junior barrister was called ...
How can algorithms help us understand books? 2 Aug 2013 | 12:00 pm
Recently the Sunday Times outed J.K. Rowling as the author of the detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, published under her nom de plume Robert Galbraith. While devotees of Rowling quickly procured an...
Lexical Investigations: Paragon 30 Jul 2013 | 12:00 pm
Today’s meaning of paragon as a model of excellence has been around since the Middle French of the 1540s, but before then, this word’s history is a bit more complicated. The old Italian word paragone ...
