Tag: lexicon

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Gael Spivak

Running Out of Words: It’s Not a Slippery Slope

January 19, 2021 by Gael Spivak | 6 Comments on Running Out of Words: It’s Not a Slippery Slope

It’s almost inevitable. People who say “we’ve gotten too PC” about language will, at some point in the discussion, claim that if we stop using certain words or phrases, we’ll run out of words to write and talk. Arriving at this spot Who is having these discussions and how does this line of thinking work? […]

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Frances Peck

Notes From Away: Cape Breton English

August 5, 2014 by Frances Peck | 14 Comments on Notes From Away: Cape Breton English

My first job, selling sundries the summer I was 12 to the cottagers and campers who flocked to Cape Breton’s fabled Mira River, was about as far from the language business as you can get. Yet a few days in, I learned a humbling linguistic lesson. Three times the customer bellowed his order across the […]

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Victoria Neufeldt

Bold Words

February 18, 2014 by Victoria Neufeldt | Leave a Comment

One could say that bold words enter the language shouting. An example would be the word AIDS, which was coined in the early 1980s, probably by a journalist, as an initialism for the descriptive medical name of the disease: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Because the disease burst upon the world so devastatingly, the word AIDS was in the news just about […]

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Victoria Neufeldt

Shy Words

December 17, 2013 by Victoria Neufeldt | Leave a Comment

When I took on the commitment, a year ago, of contributing blog postings about language, I began bravely by tossing out a little ditty that came into my mind, inspired by Dr. Seuss: “New words, old words, shy words, bold words.” Well, I’ve talked about old words and new words, but shy words? What was […]

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Victoria Neufeldt

Old Words

April 16, 2013 by Victoria Neufeldt | 1 Comment on Old Words

Old words are just as interesting as new words.  But how old is old?  We use a good number of words today that go all the way back to Old English, the language of the Germanic peoples who invaded and then settled in England in the fifth century A.D.  These “native” words are some of […]

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