Posts Tagged ‘etymology’
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Posted by Janet Gough on September 08, 2011
Our final guest post in a somewhat longer gender English month comes from freelance lexicographer and editor Janet Gough. _________ A 1981 postcard published by The Women’s Press presents us with the following predicament: Dear Sirs • man to man • manpower • craftsman working men • the thinking man • the man in the street [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on August 08, 2011
A recent study used a Twitter-based corpus to examine the relationship between language and gender. One of the things it looked at was “gender-skewed words” – words used by one gender more than the other. Among the words used predominantly by girls and women were: feel, love, hair, sleep, wait, cute, yummy, totally, aww, ugh, [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on April 19, 2011
A recent addition to the Open Dictionary is the word demirep. It’s not a new word – in fact it’s been around since at least 1749 when Henry Fielding used the term in his novel Tom Jones: ‘… he had no knowledge of that character which is vulgarly called a demirep.’ But it must have [...]
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Posted by Shane Rae on June 01, 2009
The upcoming June Bonfire Festival (13th to 29th June) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil has me thinking about the word bonfire itself. All over the world people use bonfires to celebrate local events. In the United States it is tradition to mark a community’s Homecoming Day by a gathering around a bonfire. In the UK [...]
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Posted by Jonathan Cole on May 06, 2009
Have you come across the acronyms lol (laugh out loud) or brb (be right back) from texting or instant messaging? Perhaps you have lazily texted or typed C u 2mrw (see you tomorrow)? Are you a fan of the hugely popular Lol Cats (to the left) with their sometimes strange but often hilarious captioning language? [...]
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