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...
by Sue Horner | Nov 25, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Yesterday, a headline in a prominent newspaper boldly proclaimed that the Saudi king was handing over the reigns while he was in the U.S. for treatment. Since a king only has one reign, and he holds it whether he’s in the U.S. or not, I thought at first maybe...
by Sue Horner | Nov 22, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The author of one of my textbooks must be a friend of the magniloquent (see below) Conrad Black, or maybe a contributor to the harder levels of FreeRice.com. I say that because the text is sprinkled with so many obscure, unusual, “look how smart I am” kinds of words....
![TTYL – I’m busy herding cats!]()
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 | Sep 6, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I love reading the expressive ways other people have found to make a point. Here are my latest finds (the parts I particularly like are in bold): • “I sometimes think of cancer as a long and difficult journey, a quest out of Tolkien, or a dark waltz.” –...
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 | May 3, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Tell me you do this, too — as you flip past the newspaper section containing obituaries, you can’t help but stop and read the ones accompanied by a photo of a young-looking person. Here’s why I do it. Having lost a few friends to cancer, I feel...
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...
by Sue Horner | Mar 14, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Among the many sports my family watched during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics was one that vividly reminded me to watch out for jargon. I’m talking about curling. I’ve never curled, so I found the unfamiliar lingo quite confusing. The commentators talked about a...
