Word: words
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jesse Sheidlower is the world's expert on the F word - and that's an expertise that requires more work than you might think. Sheidlower is editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, and his 270-page book, The F-Word, newly updated and revised, was years in the making. "There aren't that many words that you can write an entire book about, and of those, very, very few of them are ones that you would actually want to read," says Sheidlower. "There's a huge opportunity here as a scholar for something that has been a part...
What happens when two regions face off, determined to subdue the other? In the Old Testament, the men of Gilead asked fugitives if they were from Ephraim, demanding they utter the now-legendary word “Shibboleth.” Those who pronounced anything different became the enemy; 42,000 were slaughtered in the River Jordan...
Update the river to the Charles and test whether sports fans can pronounce the word “destroyer” to rhyme with Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia, and we can brace ourselves for another regional clash of Biblical proportions—if we forget our heads and mistake sport for anything more than amusement. Bostonians and Harvard peers often forget civility and manners in their fanatical support for their own team...
...transcribers and fact checkers to expedite the process. But in the end, how quickly the book gets finished depends largely on the ghostwriter's drive to grind it out. "My friends used to joke about, I think it's Control plus F10 - [the computer shortcut that brings up] the word count," says Barbara Feinman Todd, who ghostwrote Hillary Clinton's 1996 best seller, It Takes a Village, among other books. Jenkins, meanwhile, recalls months of pumping out 40 pages a week for Armstrong's memoir. "You're a basket case afterward," she says. "But you can certainly...
...long will this last?' " he said 96 hours after the invasion began. "It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two, but we will prevail." Three weeks into the war, New York Times reporter R.W. Apple wrote that "the ominous word quagmire has begun to haunt conversations" in Washington about the conflict. Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld had little time for such grousing. "I must say that I hear some impatience from the people who have to produce news every 15 minutes," he said as the first month's fighting neared...