by Dictionary Scoop Are you a cool cat? Or a groovy alligator? The Age of Jazz had a vast cultural influence on both American music and culture, but one of its most curious aspects was “jive talk”” the quirky jargon it birthed. Largely influenced by jazz singer Cab Calloway – who authored at least two dictionaries …
Category Archives: Words
Crash Bang Hiss! Here’s To Onomatopoeias
by Dictionary Scoop A language as elastic and adaptive as English allows for words that describe anything you can think of. And onomatopoeias stand out as vibrant threads that weave together the sound and vision of our daily communication. These words echo the sounds they represent, adding a symphony of sensory richness to …
More Words (And A Suffix) From Yiddish
by Kevin Burton Along with more words English has gotten from Yiddish, today we include one suffix. A suffix is a letter of group of letters added to the end of a word. It can change the word’s grammatical function or meaning. The best example of a suffix from my formative years …
English Words That Came From Yiddish
by Kevin Burton You could go to college and learn about words and word formation, or you could go to the nearest schoolyard. How do we get the words we get? The cool kids, the most influential ones, talk a certain way. Soon the school follows. Believe me, in school had turns …
God’s Impetuous Child Lives At My House
by Kevin Burton I actually did this, I promise. Neither Winston Churchill nor any other learned observer from the past, present or future, would have called this “my finest hour.” I bring you this, even though there may be somebody reading Page 7 for the first time today. Sheesh. There was a …
Scrabble Words And “Y” As A Proud Vowel
by Kevin Burton Merriam-Webster promised me a list of Scrabble words without vowels, but delivered a bunch of words (with one exception) with the letter Y in them. Y is a vowel, a card-carrying vowel. The fact that it has a part-time job as a consonant does not change that. The venerable dictionary …
The Unkindest Contranym Of All? Ask Fido
by Kevin Burton Imagine if you will, a Richard Pryor bit from the 70s, that could have been, to introduce the concept of the contranym, a word with two opposite meanings. These lines are from the family puppy, whose usual panting, tail-wagging enthusiasm for a car ride (oh boy!) has gone tragically wrong: …
Far From Being Obsolete, Braille Is Essential
by Tracy Conly (Tracy Conly is a longtime friend from our days at the Ohio State School for the Blind, a great Braille reader and advocate for the blind. This is her reaction to our March 15 story “A New Tool In The Fight For Braille Literacy.”) “Braille changes lives. It gives thousands …
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More English Words From Japanese
by Kevin Burton Some of my totally blind friends used to fold dollar bills in certain ways so they would know what denomination they were. That was before the days of bill reader devices, so I’m not sure anybody does that folding any more. Anyway I used to call that folding that people …
English Words That Come From Japanese
by Kevin Burton Words do not respect borders, nor do they need passports to move from country to country. We don’t think of Japan so much as an origin for English words, but plenty of words are borrowed from Japanese. Merriam-Webster dictionary has served up a basketful, some of which I bring today. …
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