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music/art/culture

Vocabulary Yoga – 5

It’s time for another round of language-stretching vocabulary yoga. Here are some recent finds that I picked up on WordSpy and the Open Dictionary.
joy-to-stuff ratio: the time a person has to enjoy life versus the time a person spends accumulating material goods
butt bus: a bus parked near a pub or restaurant that is used as [...]

Schoolhouse Rockers

Remember Schoolhouse Rock? With their cool and groovy attempts to get us all to pay attention to grammar, punctuation, politics and whatever else was deemed worthy?
Here are a few word-nerd favorites to jog your memory:
The Tale of Mr. Morton

Verbs

Conjunction Junction

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Bronte Sisters [...]

Vocabulary Yoga – 4

For this round of Vocabulary Yoga, I visited Miriam Webster’s Open Dictionary; an incredibly entertaining and informative place. As the name implies, it’s an open project, that anyone can submit words and their definitions to. Here are some recent favorites:
textcasm: sarcasm used in text messaging or in online social networking
terribad: having exceptionally poor or undesirable [...]

Owed to a Spelling Chequer

by Jerrold H. Zar
I have a spelling checker.
It came with my pea sea.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Eye ran this poem threw it.
Your sure real glad two no.
Its very polished in its weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
A checker is a blessing.
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right [...]

English Language Oddities

The list-loving folks at listverse.com have come up with 25 English Language Oddities to illustrate some of the curiosities and gotchas that native speakers don’t think about, but that make English one of the trickiest languages to learn. Here are some of my favorites:
“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt.”
“Ough” [...]

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