Word: worde
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Still, in a handful of cities and towns, women make up the majority of the local government. Take McLean, Texas, a town off Old Route 66 that has a single stoplight. McLean has a female mayor and, despite the gendered nature of the word, a board of aldermen that is half women. In fact, until its most recent election, the board was entirely female. McLean, pop. 830, also has a female postmaster, justice of the peace, newspaper editor and principal of the schools. "We had a previous administration that had internal problems. People around town kept asking...
...whether any Russian naval forces, rather than just Armored Personnel Carriers, are involved in blocking Poti. But the comparison to the Berlin airlift is unavoidable, and both rhetorically and practically the Administration has clearly decided to go in that direction. "We fully expect Russia to keep its word to provide free access to humanitarian assistance and allow any of our assistance to arrive either by military or commercial means by air, land and sea," said White House press secretary Dana Perino...
This time around, China, the reigning world champions, wanted vengeance - and they got it by a gaping 7.250 margin over their Japanese rivals. In a packed stadium where a giant T.V. screen repeatedly lauded the Chinese performances with the word "wonderful" - only one American merited a "fantastic" - the team got down to the business of winning gold for China. The start was shaky. In the second rotation, Huang Xu fumbled on the pommel horse, earning a score of 14.750 and putting pressure on pommel world champion Xiao Qin, who redeemed the squad with 16.175. (Xiao had slipped on the pommel...
...Word nerds aren't the only ones with a stake in the proposal. People who have trouble with spelling are punished when it comes to applying for jobs or even filling out forms, even though their mistakes are far from unusual, says Jack Bovill, chairman of the British-based Spelling Society, an international organization that has advocated simplified spellings since 1908. A 2007 Spelling Society survey of 1,000 British adults found that more than half could not spell embarrassed or millennium correctly and more than a quarter struggled with definitely, accidentally and separate...
...Pickett, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, says that changes to dictionary entries are always on the table, but he and his seven fellow editors are a tough crowd. They keep an eye on print publications to see whether a variant usage has started to become mainstream. Any word that seems to be a good candidate for an update undergoes rigorous scrutiny as the editors seek input from a panel of some 200 orthographic and lexicographic whizzes. Even among this writerly crowd, 13% admitted in 1996 to combining a lot into a single word. But 93% still considered...