by Dictionary Scoop While many things bring Americans closer to the UK, some aspects of our language set us apart. English is spoken by more than 1.4 billion people worldwide; with so many people using this language, it is understandable that some differences have developed. Today we walk through 10 drastic vocabulary differences between American …
Tag Archives: English
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: …
Nebraska Town Divided Over Immigration
by Didi Martinez, Julia Ainsley and Laura Strickler, NBC News FREMONT, Neb. — Big-city mayors may be complaining about the economic impact of an influx of migrants, but the residents of a small city near Omaha can’t decide how they feel. Fremont, Nebraska, population 27,000, has three massive meat-processing plants. As young locals leave in …
Some Phrases We Got From Shakespeare
by Kevin Burton I feel bad that I haven’t read anything by Shakespeare all the way through. Don’t know why I feel that way. The next person who asks me if I have read Shakespeare, will be the first. So it doesn’t really matter. Ask me in public, “Shakespeare or Steely Dan” …
Words We Got From Characters In Books
by Kevin Burton I don’t regret having read the backs of so many baseball cards so much as a youth, but I do wish I had mixed in a few more of the better works of literature. Today we get some of what I missed out on, from a list compiled by Merriam-Webster …
These Palindromes Get You Coming And Going
by dictionaryscoop.com We all remember palindromes from our childhood years. Funny sentences that read the same forward as backward. Some are short, some incredibly long, and while some do make sense, most of them are surrealist, to say the least. From the whimsical “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” to the succinct …
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12 Words We Need In The English Language
by Kevin Burton What a glorious toybox is language. Words and their shadings and peculiarities have been one of the few constants I can count on in life. The little sticks-and-stones bromide which states “words will never hurt me” is false in its context. Words can hurt a lot when used improperly, especially …
Common Words Borrowed From Arabic
by Kevin Burton Have there been more impassioned articles written about the evil of alcohol or the evil of algebra? Who can tell really? But these twin menaces are linked in today’s word list from Merriam-Webster, words borrowed by English from Arabic: Algebra Anyone who has unpleasant memories of slogging through this …
Coast To Coast: Billy Joel’s “Stop In Nevada”
by Kevin Burton On the Billy Joel portion of our rock and roll road trip you could have reasonably expected “New York State of Mind” or even “Allentown.” Instead we swing west to look at “Stop In Nevada.” This song fits very well into our road-trip theme. Today’s tale includes one of …
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Giving The Gifts Of Love And Devotion
by Kevin Burton The best jokes around our house don’t start with “knock knock” or “a guy walks into a bar.” They start with “what do you want for..” On our calendar we have spaced birthdays, Christmas, and our anniversary so that at all times there is some kind of gifting occasion on …
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