by Kevin Burton Uh-oh, I think I may be archaic. Our friends at Merriam-Webster dictionary served up a timely platter of cookies this week, a list of “archaic” words we know from Christmas songs. Well I just used one of these words last week on Page 7! In order to keep this …
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Dictionary Words Are Funky, Stylish And Cool
by Kevin Burton If the 60s were groovy, the 70s were nothing if not funky. The funk was everywhere then, beginning with music, first seeping then flowing into just about everything else. The funk was the soup we swam in. But I was a little surprised to see funky show up on …
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Uptown Words For The Stylish Wordsmith
by Kevin Burton So you read the headline “uptown words” and your mind immediately goes to Uptown Girl, the Billy Joel song, right? One could take that song as a celebration of an uptown girl. I take it as the celebration of the virtues of a downtown man. “That’s what I am,” Joel …
Dictionary Highlights Man’s Best Friend
by Kevin Burton I have suspended my devotion to cats long enough this week to share some dictionary words from Merriam-Webster that pertain to dogs. Before we continue with their list, here is one the dictionary curiously left out – dog days. Dog days is “the period between early July and early …
Merriam-Webster: Words Inspired By Dogs
by Kevin Burton If you read this blog regularly, you know I am a cat guy. A cat whisperer, my wife says. Today we’ll give equal time to dog lovers, by revealing some of the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s list of words inspired by dogs. According to Forbes, 44.5 percent of US households have …
More Words For Crimes And Misdemeanors
by Kevin Burton Children utter phrases such as “cross my heart, hope to die” to self-administer a kind of playground oath. But it’s not binding. Today our friends at Merriam-Webster bring us words dealing with what we say, or refuse to say, under a legal oath in a court of law. But …
Words From The Wrong Side Of The Law
by Kevin Burton Some of the entries on today’s word list from Merriam-Webster I learned as a wee lad, by following the news about the federal government. If it hadn’t been for the Nixon Administration and the Watergate scandal, I would have thought hush money was money a parent spends to keep the …
English Words That Came From Products
by Kevin Burton We’ve got moxie in a can. We’ve got monkey bars and monkey business, and it all comes from Merriam-Webster. This list from the dictionary highlights products that hit the market with varying success but had more staying power as words in the English language. So maybe the inventor didn’t get …
More Middle Words From Merriam-Webster
by Kevin Burton Today we continue a look at words and phrases about the middle from the Merriam Webster dictionary. We start with two phrases about being forced into difficult decisions: Devil and the deep blue sea Many phrases that evoke in-between-ness also situate the speaker between two undesirable end points, like the …
Stuck In The Middle With Merriam-Webster
by Kevin Burton I hope you don’t find this a middling effort, but today we bring to you, words about the middle. This is a list from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it reminds me of the late, great Gerry Rafferty. While a member of Stealers Wheel, Rafferty wrote “Stuck In The Middle With …
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