Tag Archives: language

CNN reports: Iran, North Korea, Syria and … commas. While Mike Pompeo is focused on a number of key geopolitical concerns, an email obtained by CNN suggests that the secretary of state also appears to have had it, up to, here, with, the rampant, improper use of commas by State Department staff. In the last few months, two emails have …

The Washington Examiner reports: President Trump said Thursday that he no longer talks to Steve Bannon, and accused reporters of exaggerating their relationship a day after his legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to the former White House chief strategist over remarks he made about Trump’s son. “I don’t talk to him. That’s just a misnomer,” Trump told the press …

From Merriam-Webster: Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2017 is feminism. The word was a top lookup throughout the year, with several spikes that corresponded to various news reports and events. The general rise in lookups tells us that many people are interested in this word; specific spikes give us insight into some of the reasons why. Feminism spiked following …

USA Today reports: Ivanka Trump’s choice to remain involved in her father’s presidency helped make “complicit” Dictionary.com’s word of the year, but the site said the word resonates with a number of 2017’s biggest stories from Washington to Hollywood. “The word ‘complicit’ has sprung up in conversations this year about those who speak out against powerful figures and institutions and …

CNBC reports: President Donald Trump will be characteristically pleased with himself when he hears that one of his favorite phrases, “fake news”, has been named “word of the year” by dictionary publisher Collins. Announcing the winner, U.K.-based Collins Dictionary said the term “fake news” saw an “unprecedented” rise with usage of the term increasing 365 percent since 2016. Defining “fake …

Gay Star News reports: A video by a New Zealand youth LGBTI organization has gone viral for its quaint approach using farmers to teach people it’s not ok to say ‘that’s gay’. Rainbow Youth was established in 1989 and is run entirely by young LGBTI people. It just released its first ever national ad campaign with a funny video to …

From the Los Angeles Times: The Times has updated its guidelines for covering the LGBTQ community. As our understanding of gender and sexual orientation evolves, so does language. The Times’ goal is to be contemporary, clear and flexible, while maintaining consistency of style. “Queer” previously was considered a term to avoid because of its history as a pejorative. However, “queer” …

The New York Times reports: A class-action lawsuit about overtime pay for truck drivers hinged entirely on a debate that has bitterly divided friends, families and foes: The dreaded — or totally necessary — Oxford comma, perhaps the most polarizing of punctuation marks. What ensued in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and in a 29-page …

The Week reports: President Trump defended his immigration executive order Wednesday while speaking at the National Sheriffs’ Association’s winter meeting. After reading the entirety of the order, which bans people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the U.S., Trump insisted the order “couldn’t have been written any more precisely.” Whether “you’re a good student in high school or a …

The A.V. Club reports: America still has much to learn from drag queens—gender being a social construct, for example, or the perils of hog body—but there’s one aspect of drag culture that has long since moved into the mainstream, and that’s the slang. Chief among these linguistic gifts is a new, many-layered meaning for the word “shade,” a concept that …

From Merriam-Webster: Fact (“a piece of information presented as having objective reality”) spiked dramatically on January 22nd, following an exchange between Chuck Todd and Kellyanne Conway on NBC’s Meet the Press that was fraught with epistemological tension. “You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary is giving alternative facts to that,” Conway shot back. “Wait a minute, …

Metro reports: It’s the ‘insult’ of choice for many a schoolyard bully but being called gay should be not considered offensive, Italy’s high court has ruled. Judges said the term ‘homosexual’ no longer has an ‘intrinsically offensive meaning as, perhaps, might have been considered in the not-so-distant past’, ANSA reports from the Cassation Court in Rome. The judgement was made …

Somehow the right wing Washington Examiner manages not to mention Trump in their story about this tweet, which was flagged for us by JMG reader John. The good people at Merriam-Webster practically begged users to search for any word other than “fascism” so the dictionary company could avoid making it the word of 2016. In a tweet posted Tuesday afternoon, …

The Associated Press reports: You might have thought about it, heard it. A lot. You might have even felt it: Dictionary.com’s word of the year is “xenophobia.” While it’s difficult to get at exactly why people look words up in dictionaries, online or on paper, it’s clear that in contentious 2016, fear of “otherness” bruised the collective consciousness around the …

The runner-up is “alt-right.”From the Oxford Dictionary blog: After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. The concept of post-truth has been in existence …

A French court has ruled it a criminal offense to call somebody a homophobe. Laure Pora, the former head of Paris ACT UP, has been fined $2500 for using the word on a poster of La Manif Pour Tous president Ludovine Rochere, seen above marching in NOM’s 2014 hate parade in Washington DC. Gay Star News reports: In 2013, ACT …

Reuters reports: You know, some yogalates could tackle those splendiferous moobs. Confused? Then turn to the Oxford English Dictionary which has included the words among more than 1,000 revisions and updates for its latest update. Splendiferous, meaning full of or abounding in splendor, joins yogalates, a fitness routine combining pilates exercises with the techniques of yoga, and moobs, unusually prominent …

“You look at The New York Times, I mean, the fail — I call it ‘The Failing New York Times’ because it won’t be in business for another, probably more than a few years unless somebody goes in and buys it and wants to lose a lot of money. But The New York Times is so unfair. I mean they …

Via Reuters: A Texas-based LGBT advocacy outlet helped spark a grammar debate this week over whether an errant comma in the stridently anti-homosexual Republican Party of Texas platform can be read as saying the majority of Texans are gay. The plank that was approved by delegates at the party’s convention this month reads: “Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is …

The office of Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) just wrote to say that earlier today he become the first member of Congress to use the term “cisgender” in a House speech. Grayson stood next to a large portrait of transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen as he delivered a 13-minute denouncement of the GOP and of North Carolina’s anti-LGBT hate law. Grayson is …