The following is a small collection of terms that have been in the news in connection with the pandemic that is now affecting us all. These terms can be confusing, and we…
Words in the World
Neologisms: what makes a new word sticky?
What does it take to invent a word that takes root in the American English language–at least for a while? Ralph Keyes suggests that necessity (new things demand new names) and, on…
Meet the “Dame of Dictionaries.”
“I read and read and read and read and read,” she says. In fifth grade, her parents gave her a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and that changed everything. “It unlocked the world for me…