“Most verbs stay basically the same in different grammatical roles. ‘Walk’ looks like ‘walks’ and ‘walked.’ But the word ‘be’ looks nothing like the word ‘am,’ which looks nothing like the word ‘were.’” (Arika Okrent for Curiosity.)
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When I wrote about mansplain, in September 2010, the earliest citation I found for the word was from an April 2009 Urban Dictionary entry. Now lexicographers at the OED have antedated mansplaining to a May 2008 comment about the TV show “Supernatural.”Katherine Connor Martin, Oxford University Press’s head of US dictionaries, says the OED usually waits a decade or so before adding new words, but makes exceptions when a word “is deemed important enough.” (Quartz)
Mansplain magazine via Matt Round
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And Merriam-Webster has added mansplain – and 849 other words – to its online dictionary. (Merriam-Webster)
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And Neal Goldfarb explains the semantics of splaining, man- and otherwise. (Language Log.)
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The origins of the “globalist” slur. (Ben Zimmer for The Atlantic, where he’s now a contributing editor.)’
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“Typos, spelling mistakes are commonplace in Trump’s White House.” (Washington Post, via Iva Cheung)
BEYNO: the cool futuristic typeface from Black Panther’s closing credits. (Kottke)
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not enough people are addressing that Frozen on Broadway has the same tagline as Brokeback Mountain pic.twitter.com/xylC8HWZNL
— Austin (@austinperse) March 6, 2018
(Hat tip: Matthew Hintz).
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Will Black Panther influence baby-naming trends? (Baby Name Wizard)
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A guide to hate symbols and numerical codes. (ADL)
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Scotch brand Johnnie Walker has launched “the Jane Walker edition”; for each bottle it sells it’s donating $1 to organizations that support gender equality, including Monumental Women and She Should Run. (Adweek) A bit of history: The brand’s founder, John Walker, was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, in 1805 and began selling spirits in 1820. His first eponymous brand was Walker’s Kilmarnock; the Johnnie Walker brand was introduced by his son, Alexander, in 1909. Bonus link: my 2006 post on Johnnie Walker branding in Beirut.
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From hurricanes to “the Beast from the East”: why we name the weather. (How We Get to Next)
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Why do we love to complain about language, and what sorts of language change provoke the most complaints? (Guardian)
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I wrote about that odd word oust earlier this year. Now John Kelly asks: What’s up with the er in ouster? (Mashed Radish)
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They discovered a new species of cat that's like an ocelot but smaller and they DID NOT name it the ocelittle. What are you doing, biologists?? pic.twitter.com/ms2rLi4eCM
— Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) March 6, 2018
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A map of the world with every country’s tourism slogan. Tanzania’s “The Land of Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar and the Serengeti” would be hard to fit on a bumper sticker. (FamilyBreakFinder)
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