You know that grammatical “rule” about not ending a sentence with a preposition? Well, who ever decided finishing off a sentence like that is a bad thing? (Personally, we think it’s one of the silliest things anyone ever came up with.)
A Woodbridge, Connecticut, caller tells the story of coming across the following definition for jungftak in Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary (1943): “n. A Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing, on the right side, and the female...
Many of us learned the rule about using the preposition between when talking about two items, but among when talking about more than two. In reality, though, the rule is a little more complicated. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
Grant and Martha recommend dictionaries for college students, both online references (OneLook.com, The Oxford English Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary) and the old-fashioned kind to keep at one’s elbow (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary...
Word nerd Ammon Shea quit his job as a furniture mover in New York City to spend an entire year reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary. The result, in addition to eyestrain, headaches, and skeptics’ puzzlement, was Shea’s new book, Reading the...
wash-ashore n.— «The latest demand—made this month in a legal notice by San Francisco homeowners looking to sell their waterfront land for a tidy $10.75 million—has sparked what longtime Chatham resident Ned Webster calls “the big dinghy flap.” It...