Ever been inconsolably distraught that no single word in English describes the condition of “being without eyebrows”? Say, when you were preparing to make an argument about whether your dog has them (i.e., eyebrows) or not, for a major televised debate? How happy would you have been to learn that there actually exists such [...]

The Research Digest blog highlights a recent study, where:

“researchers say we’ve adopted a number of habits of convenience that reflect the frequent use of positive words in our language (in turn reflecting the greater frequency of positivity in the world). For example, positive words tend to be ‘unmarked’ – that is, the positive is [...]

Exemplar is an amazing website that:

searches over 1,900 journals from Springer’s collection to find authentic examples of how a word or phrase is used in published literature. Comprehensive coverage includes both current and archival content in all major subject areas including the life sciences, medicine, engineering, mathematics, computer science, business, and law, [...]

The British Broadcasting Corporation reports today that the Local Government Association in the UK has “banned” 200 words of jargon in council discourse.

What are some of the worst offenders?

Blue sky thinking
Can do culture
Coterminosity
Double devolution
Horizon scanning
Improvement levers
Pathfinder
Potentialities
Quantum
Revenue Streams
Subsidiarity
Symposium
Thinking outside of the box
Value-added

What would be YOUR pick for the 5 worst [...]

The video “The Child,” by French disc jockey Alex Gopher, created by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet (H5), is one of the most incredible videos I have ever seen. The world is visualized in words…skylines, taxis, people, elevators, roads, buildings…everything.

I have often thought about how texts mediate my world…and this video realizes that [...]

Researchers at the University of Reading, led by evolutionary theorist Mark Pagel, claim to have come up with an elementary “Stone Age phrasebook” comprising some of the oldest words, and to have mapped out the evolution of many words through comparisons between the Indo-European family of languages over a 30,000 year period. The [...]

Experiencing TOT? That word you know-but can’t recall-driving you crazy?

Then head on over to Tip of My Tongue, the brainchild of Chirag Mehta, a University of Tampa graduate student. Mehta developed an algorithm to help visitors remember elusive words using input like what the word starts with, what it contains, what it [...]

Wayne State University‘s “Word Warriors” site “propose[s] to help rejuvenate the language we love [English] by advocating for words of style and substance that see far too little use.”

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