by Sue Horner | May 18, 2012 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
It’s Friday, and it’s the start of a long weekend (at least here in Canada). Seems like the perfect time for some word fun! Is it a piece of IKEA furniture or a type of cheese? An amusing quiz from Mental Floss. Thou wayward rump-fed malt-worm! Have some...
by Sue Horner | Jan 6, 2012 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
TGIF! Time for a few minutes of seemingly mindless fun, with a secret learning component (thanks to Merriam-Webster and Oxford Dictionaries): Don’t you want to find out How Strong is your Vocabulary? (This replaces one that’s no longer available, sadly:...
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by Sue Horner | Nov 18, 2011 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Hey, it’s Friday. Time for some silly fun with words! Play Hangman with Oxford English Dictionary. No surprise, expect tricky words. Play Oxford Fortune Cookie on Twitter by tweeting “I want to play OxfordFortuneCookie with @OUPAcademic” and a number...
by Sue Horner | Aug 27, 2011 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I get such a kick out of the Bulwer-Lytton award, which challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The contest pays tribute to the famous “It was a dark and stormy night” opening of the 1830 novel Paul...
by Sue Horner | Apr 14, 2011 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I’m late to the game talking about this, but I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to be upset that the Oxford English Dictionary will now include OMG and LOL, as of the March 24 update. This adds insult to injury, I suppose, after previous additions...
by Sue Horner | Jan 8, 2011 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Those crazy word-nerds in the American Dialect Society have done it again, coming out with “app” as their Word of the Year for 2010. As even your grandmother probably knows, app is short for software application, and has gained particular popularity in...
by Sue Horner | Jan 2, 2011 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Along with a fresh new year comes the latest list of Banished Words, as issued by Lake Superior State University. How epic is that? While you might wish many of these words to actually be banished forever, that’s just wishful thinking. The list for 2011 includes...
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by Sue Horner | Oct 6, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Fall is that exciting time of year (for word nerds) when The Oxford American Dictionary adds new words and phrases — this year, 2,000 of them! What’s not to like about the list? It includes abbreviations now recognized as words, like BFF (best friends...
by Sue Horner | Jun 29, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Here are some of the interesting and funny words I’ve run across recently. Most are from Buzzwhack and urbandictionary.com: Academic junk food: College courses with no value other than being an easy way to get an A. Anticipointment: The feeling you get when a...
by Sue Horner | Apr 9, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
To wind up the work week and provide some amusement for word nerds, here are a few errors spotted recently in print or online, some of them in places where someone really should have known better/proofread: …wore a vile of her blood (vial) …balling her...
