A Walk in the WoRds

Pick one or the other. A recent Wrong Hands comic that I enjoyed.

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

A semantic phenomenon, similar to the phonetic one I wrote about in Phonetic Typing Errors , occurred recently while I was writing a freelan...

I happened to have seen these two logos within an hour or so of each other yesterday and I was struck by the similarity between them. Whil...

pair v. paired, pair·ing, pairs v.tr. 1. To arrange in sets of two; couple. 2. To join in a pair; mate. 3. To provide a partner for. v...

I stopped at the bank today and noticed round stickers all over the branch that asked the following question: Of course there is some...

Tim Hortons is advertising a limited-time Caramel Chocolate Brownie Iced Capp Supreme. The tagline for the campaign is "Brownie Poin...

Burnett's Flavored Vodkas may have launched the " Always Your Flavorite " advertising campaign over a year ago, but I just s...

Driving on the expressway recently, I passed a truck bearing a particular phrase. Most drivers would probably write it off as an eponymous ...

zeugma Traditionally of cases of coordination in which one element would not form a construction on its own. E.g. one cannot say They said ...

'yes-no question' One which has a simple positive or negative answer. CF . closed interrogative, polar interrogative. yod The soun...

Polysemy differs from homonymy because polysemes are etymologically related words. Homonyms are words that have unrelated meanings. The ver...

I love xkcd because xkcd is loved by me. Speaking of tautologies ...

' wanna -contraction' The reduction in American English of forms like want to or going to in I want to (wanna) do it or I'm ...

Is it "slim to none" or "slim and none"? I grew up with the phrase "slim to none", which means that the chanc...

there -insertion A term used in transformational grammar for a transformation which relates pairs of sentences by inserting a there -elemen...

pandialectal A term used primarily in dialectology and sociolinguistics to characterize any linguistic feature, rule, etc., which is applic...

Lord knows the difference between further and farther has been covered on the internet too many times to count, but if a ballpark number hel...

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

The comma is not truly the only punctuation tool you will ever need, but it sure does do a lot. The Purdue Online Writing Guide lists the f...