Category Archives: Language

What’s your word of the year?

Posted on January 31, 2023 by Ed Battistella

What words epitomized 2022? Earlier this month, the attendees at the American Dialect Society selected –ussy as the Word of the Year for 2022. It’s a word part, a suffix, that according to linguist Ben Zimmer, who emcees the Word … Continue reading →

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The Disappearing Act-cent, a guest post by Weather Lenczewski

Posted on August 27, 2022 by Ed Battistella

Weather Lenczewski  is a junior in the Honors College at SOU. She is a Sociology and Anthropology major with a History minor. She hails from Woodstock, Illinois, but currently resides in the Rogue Valley.       The Disappearing Act-cent … Continue reading →

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An Interview with Ellen Jovin, author of Rebel with a Clause

Posted on July 5, 2022 by Ed Battistella

Ellen Jovin has a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.A. from UCLA and has studied twenty-five languages for fun. Jovin is a cofounder of Syntaxis, a communication consultancy, and the author of four books on English and writing, She … Continue reading →

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An Interview with Diana Coogle

Posted on March 22, 2022 by Ed Battistella

Diana Coogle grew up in Georgia and attended Vanderbilt University (graduating Phi Beta Kappa and fifth in her class) later earning an MA in English at Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon. A former … Continue reading →

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