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Why read and subscribe? Because the alphabet is a gift, language is the original sharing app, literacy is a miracle, and English has more facets than a diamond masterly cut into a round brilliant. Much pleasure awaits…

New Test Post

as dfasdfa dsfg adg adg asd gasd fgads g
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What the heck does ‘yeet’ mean?

Merriam and others don’t simply yeet a new word into the dictionary when they first encounter it. They wait for “sustained, meaningful, widespread use”.
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Some great familects from two films and a TV series

These extracts of dialogue from the inimitable Sin City, A Clockwork Orange, and The Wire are great examples of how incredibly eloquent familect words and phrases (neologisms) can be.
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“It’s on the tip of my tongue…”: What we say when the right word eludes us

You look for a word. You’re about to say it. Then, poof, it’s gone. What’s going on? The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) moment phenomenon = both the forgetting of a word or name and the trace of it in our memory.
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So, why do we use ‘hello’ as a conversation-starter?

While OK is the most spoken word on the planet, hello is the English word that most people learn first. It was popularised by the adoption of the telephone. Here’s a brief history.
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Semantic superheroes are taking to the streets

Under cover of night, volunteers with a shared purpose criss-cross their city. They’re not revolutionaries; they’re people who love grammar. Inserting accents, commas and question marks, and removing erroneous ones, they correct the language shortcomings of poets in training and unrequited lovers.
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‘The New Yorker’ magazine and the fixations of its outlier house style

The weekly magazine The New Yorker is well known for its cartoons, journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, photography, poetry, crosswords and puzzles. But it’s also known for its “distractingly idiosyncratic” house style. “Nöw yöu knöw”.
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