28 Apr
Watch artificial intelligence – the cutting edge of engineering – live up to its creepy image, as comedian and ‘The Tonight Show’ host Jimmy Fallon apprehensively lets a snakebot climb his leg, has a super-awkward conversation with the placid android Sophia, and gets all butterfingered with an expensive butterfly bot. The snakebot, developed at Carnegie […]
24 Apr
For some reason, some people think that the harder something is to read, the smarter it must be. But a long word or a complex sentence is not necessarily more effective than a short word or a simple sentence. Indeed, the opposite is often true. We have discussed before why verbosity is a terrible way […]
17 Apr
Life is awesome, right? So is pizza, The Walking Dead, and your favourite pair of Converse shoes. The word gets tired and loses its glow with overuse. Ask Dean Winchester. So, for this Word Nerd, we came up with 9 lesser-known alternatives to awesome that you can sprinkle liberally on your conversations. We hope that […]
11 Apr
Recently, someone asked on Quora, “What has been your strangest experience with a teacher. Many stories followed, including a few disturbing ones. Our favorite was this one, contributed by someone named Annie Howard: When I was studying for GCSE French, our teacher had some very odd ideas: He gave people nicknames based on their names […]
10 Apr
The UK has bizarre place names. We’re not just talking about the tiny Welsh town with a name 58 characters long – Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, or Pity Me – a village in Durham County. Between these two places – the first of which we doubt you’ll ever wrap your tongue around, and the second you will never […]
3 Apr
Business news reports sometimes refer to “manufacturing units” when they mean “factories”. One college library had a sign above its photocopier that read “Reprographic Unit”. We often use two or more long words when a short one would be enough. This sort of verbosity – sometimes the result of a shaky vocabulary, and at other […]
22 Mar
Poetry, for most of us, is like an embarrassing aunt. The one we want to avoid at social gatherings, the one we nod at absently when she grabs us and talks nineteen to the dozen, the one we are reluctant to be seen with in public, for fear that she will bore or embarrass the […]
20 Mar
Every party has a crashing bore who will corner you and launch into a labyrinthine story. Every seminar has that one gasbag in the audience who will share a personal opinion disguised as a never-ending question. Every family gathering has that dreaded relative with a chronic case of verbal diarrhea. Verbosity is a common hazard, […]
13 Mar
Is English a phonetic language? Yes. No. Maybe. If it was as phonetic a language as Hindi or Spanish, we would speak it just as we spell it. Instead, we have the silent k’s (knowledge, knight, kneel) and g’s (gnash, gnostic, gnome), the moody oe sound (shoes, does, goes), and the troublesome th (Thames, Thomas, […]
6 Mar
Blue moons, green thumbs & red carpets – these colourful phrases are a staple of our vocabulary. So much so that we are almost unconscious of how quirky a take on reality they are! For instance, do Prince Charles & his royal mum really have blue blood in their veins? Unless royals are octopuses in […]