Barbara Wallraff
Taunton
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Articles by Barbara Wallraff
Who Made That Word and Why?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary contains around 470,000 words. Where do they all come from? And why can we still not find the one we’re looking for? Writer and editor Barbara Wallraff explores the creation of new words. The most famous coiner of words may be William Shakespeare. But, as Wallraff notes, this aspect of his reputation is complicated. He was writing at a time before we collected all English words into dictionaries.
MIT Index
From its laid-back hackers to its rigorous academics, MIT can be a bewildering place for the uninitiated. From 1925 to the 1940s, a multi-day “Freshman Camp” was held at Lake Massapoag, featuring talks, sports, and traditions like dunking the sophomore class president. Today, first-years learn about campus culture during Orientation/Residence Exploration (REX) week. Find out a bit more about the Class of 2022 and the experiences of previous generations with this compilation of first-year facts.
The cartographer of cells
Last October, Aviv Regev spoke to a gathering of international scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. For Regev, a computational and systems biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the gathering was also a homecoming of sorts. Regev earned her PhD from nearby Tel Aviv University in 2002. Now, 15 years later, she was back to discuss one of the most ambitious projects in the history of biology.
Word Court
Language geeks have given the name eggcorns to usages of this kind—“spontaneous reshapings of known expressions” which seem to make sense. (Eggcorn is itself an eggcorn, for acorn.) Whether step foot in is, or originally was, an eggcorn has been hotly but inconclusively debated. However, no one argues that set foot in is anything other than standard English.
Word Fugitives - The Atlantic
Last October this page sought a word for a person "who, in looking up a word in the dictionary, is compelled to look across the page for another, equally interesting entry." A number of readers thought of Webster surfer.
Improve Your Writing to Improve Your Credibility
People jump to all kinds of conclusions about you when they read documents you have written. They decide, for instance, how smart, how creative, how well organized, how trustworthy, and how considerate you are. And once they have made up their minds, it is hard to get them to see you differently. Research in social psychology shows how sticky early impressions are.
Shouldn’t There Be a Word ... ? - The American Scholar
Michele M. F./Flickr Imagine being the first person in the world ever to say anything. What fun it would be to fill a language with words: tree, dog, wolf, fire, husband, wife, kiddies. But putting names to things quickly gets complicated. For instance, if I call my husband husband, what should I call my friend’s husband? Just for the sake of argument, let’s say I name him a man. So is my husband still only my husband, or is he, too, a man? Maybe he could go by both names.
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