Wordorigins.org

On Monday, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show did a story on making English the official language of the US. Too funny.

Sunday’s International Herald Tribune has a piece on the quotative like, the use of the word like to introduce a quote, as in:

She was, like, “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that outfit.”

Like it or not, it appears as if this use of like is here to stay.

An eggcorn is an error in usage where the word is altered to a more familiar form that sounds nearly the same; acorn becomes eggcorn or in high dudgeon is changed to in high dungeon. An eggcorn differs from a folk etymology in that the former is an error by a single individual while the latter is a usage adopted by a wider group. An eggcorn could develop into a folk etymology as it gets wider use, as may be happening with hone in on in place of home in on. Eggcorns are similar to mondegreens.

The term eggcorn was coined in September 2003 when linguist Mark Liberman posted to Language Log asking for a name for this phenomenon. He used eggcorn/acorn as an example. Fellow linguist Geoff Pullum responded with the suggestion that they be called eggcorns.

(Source: Language Log)

Daniel Finkelstein, comment editor for The Times (London) provides a guide to using a handful of Yiddish words. Example, on the difference between the Yiddish shmooze and the English chat:

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton schmooze. Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton chat.

Americans may not understand all the references to Britons.

I have begun adding articles from old issues of A Way With Words to the website. When I converted the site to the new format, I included all the AWWW articles that were in HTML format, but the older articles (2002-2005) were in PDF format and I did not convert them. I’m doing that now.

So far, I’ve added all the 2002 articles and I’ll be adding the rest in the coming couple of weeks. Unlike the Big List, I’m not updating these articles, so some of the statements in them are obsolete. But the articles are all marked with the original date of publication, so it should be easy to see that these were written some time ago.

So go ahead and browse through them. They are also accessible via the site’s search engine.