A Walk in the WoRds

A semantically spot-on portmanteau - Spotted on If Companies Had Realistic Slogans at BuzzFeed.

University of Michigan's Anne Curzan gives a great mini-lecture about slang words formed by clipping and how these words have the potent...

In a  post  a week or so ago I mentioned my new hobby of  Geocaching . Look what happens when a Geocaching sticker is added to a linguistics...

But 'twou'dn't've been easily comprehensible. The link to the Wiktionary page about English double contractions has been ma...

Clipping, back-formation, and affixing, that is. Clipping is a word creation process that takes a historically, multi-syllabic word and remo...

"The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman" by Meg Wolitzer ʌ ʌ (2 carets up) What a wonderful book for young readers. Whether interested i...

If you are wondering which sporting event to watch this weekend, you may want to take the blimpworthiness factor of the options into consid...

Back in January, I posted about a linguistic phenomenon that I observed and was unable to label. The original post titled "Contraction ...

One of my sons recently purchased comedian Demetri Martin's book, "This is a Book". As I was flipping through it, I noticed th...

Just heard the sad news that the co-creator of Mad Libs, died on Tuesday. Leonard Stern may be better-known as the television writer, produ...

I am amazed that one of my sons does not like condiments. To me, there are times when the condiment is the best part of the meal and the foo...

I hope you enjoy these two mini-lectures with Professor Anne Curzan from the University of Michigan. Part 1, The Word on Language and Gram...

What happens when a person starts to utter a contraction and then for some unknown reason decides to utter the two word phrase instead of th...

I have long known that Jean Berko Gleason is the linguist who created the Wug Test (pictured and described below); what I didn't know is...

Two words from the following list share an affix. Do you know which two and why? wetter manner ruler fewer For answer please scroll down. ??...

What a fun portmanteau word; however, according to Australian-Wildlife.com , there is no other type of platypus so the term "duck-bill...

Just spotted this ad on my Yahoo homepage. Next time I have some portmanteau fruits , I just may have to have a side of chalsa in which to d...

The sign for the women's restroom at one of our local taverns is a plaque that reads "women", unfortunately, a holiday wreath ...