Tag: definitions

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Marianne Grier

Home Is Where the Bagel Is

June 27, 2017 by Marianne Grier | 9 Comments on Home Is Where the Bagel Is

What do you mean when you say the word “home”? Amongst other definitions, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2nd ed.) defines “home” as “the place where one lives,” “a house or dwelling place” or “the place where a thing originates or is native or most common.”  As someone with nomadic tendencies, these definitions have often clashed […]

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Victoria Neufeldt

What Do Words Really Mean?

February 2, 2016 by Victoria Neufeldt | 3 Comments on What Do Words Really Mean?

How discombobulating words can be! You feel certain about what a word means, but then are challenged by another person’s interpretation. Sometimes the discussion, or even argument, is rooted in changing social situations. For example, what does poverty mean? What did it mean 200 years ago? A dispute about words may also be philosophical: there […]

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Wilf Popoff

Wasted Words: How Language Sometimes Evolves

July 7, 2015 by Wilf Popoff | 5 Comments on Wasted Words: How Language Sometimes Evolves

I’m aware of the organic nature of living languages and their need to adapt. If I forget, a glimpse of Chaucer brings me up short. His poetry shows just how much a language can change in six centuries. The remarkable capacity of English to absorb fresh concepts and to express new ideas and technology enables […]

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Karen Virag

English can be so two-faced

September 17, 2013 by Karen Virag | Leave a Comment

My head literally exploded when I read it! What text, you are wondering, could have caused such a messy and bloody scene? (And if my head literally exploded, shouldn’t I be dead?) Well, the text in question was from an article in Salon magazine (August 22, 2013) decrying the Merriam-Webster (MW) Dictionary definition of the word literally to […]

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