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Napoleon’s English Lessons: How the Military Leader Studied English to Escape...
When we talk about country club prison sentences, we tend to imagine a marginal amount of time spent on the inside, though the phrase sounds like an extended vacation. Napoleon Bonaparte—exiled to the...
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Why Is English So Hard to Learn?: The Ingenious Poem, “The Chaos,” Documents...
In 1920, Dutch writer and traveler Gerard Nolst Trenité, also known as Charivarius, published a textbook called Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen. In the appendix, he included a...
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How a Word Enters the Dictionary: A Quick Primer
Given that you’re reading this on the Internet, we presume you’ll be able to define many of the over 800 words that were added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2018: biohacking bougie bingeable...
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A Dictionary of Words Invented to Name Emotions We All Feel, But Don’t Yet...
Philosophers have always distrusted language for its slipperiness, its overuse, its propensity to deceive. Yet many of those same critics have devised the most inventive terms to describe things no...
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What Did Old English Sound Like? Hear Reconstructions of Beowulf, The Bible,...
What is the English language? Is it Anglo-Saxon? It is tempting to think so, in part because the definition simplifies a linguistic history that defies linear summary. Over the course of 1000 years,...
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A Witty Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909)
In the introduction to his Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, Tony Thorne writes of the difficulty of defining informal speech: “A symposium on slang held in France in 1989 broke up after several days...
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Why David Sedaris Hates America’s Favorite Word, “Awesome”
David Sedaris has made his name as a humorist, noting the absurdities of everything from life with his parents and siblings to the perpetual cycle of world travel and book-signing into which fame has...
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Meet the Americans Who Speak with Elizabethan English Accents: An...
I remember sitting in on a conversation with some old timers in the British village my parents grew up in, and one man remembered a time, very early on in the 20th century, where villages were so...
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Mapping the Differences in How Americans Speak English: A Geographic Look at...
In the 2005 PBS documentary series Do You Speak American? journalist Robert MacNeil traveled from fabled “sea to shining sea” to explore the mysteries of American English. Among the many questions he...
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A Tour of U.S. Accents: Bostonian, Philadelphese, Gullah Creole & Other...
You don’t have an accent — or rather, everyone has an accent, but we don’t notice our own, especially if we associate mostly with people of similar cultural backgrounds. For however we might like to...
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Who Decides What Words Get Into the Dictionary?
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary Once upon a time, we were made to believe...
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Watch Sir Ian McKellen’s 1979 Master Class on Macbeth’s Final Monologue
If only we could have had a teacher as insightful as Sir Ian McKellen explain some Shakespeare to us at an impressionable age. Above, a 38-year-old McKellen breaks down Macbeth’s famous final...
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Watch Cab Calloway Actually Perform “Mr. Hepster’s Dictionary,” His Famous...
Who’s up for a good dictionary on film? Colin Browning, assistant editor of The Bluff, a Loyola Marymount University student newspaper, has some kopasetic casting suggestions for a hypothetical...
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Watch the Original Schoolhouse Rock Composers Sing “Conjunction Junction” and...
At first blush, Schoolhouse Rock!, the interstitial animations airing between ABC’s Saturday morning cartoon line up from 1973 to 1984, may seem like a catchy, educational equivalent of sneaking...
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Prisencolinensinainciusol, the Catchy Italian Pop Song That Sounded Like It...
Yesterday a friend and I were standing on a New York City sidewalk, waiting for the light, when Stayin’ Alive began issuing at top volume from a nearby car. Pavlovian conditioning kicked in...
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