February 4, 2025
I think we all know that words like bam! and pow! are onomatopoeias. But did you know about blimp, cliché, and laugh? Onomatopoeias: A Building Block of Language Onomatopoeia is defined as “the naming of a thing or action by Read more…
No, really. That’s what the theories are actually called. I was researching onomatopoeias and accidentally stumbled upon the bow-wow theory of language origin. I thought that name was pretty funny, and then I glanced at the footnotes, which referenced two Read more…
January 28, 2025
After the whole insure vs. ensure vs. assure debacle, I started to question every similar word pairing out there. What about who vs. whom? That vs. which? Affect vs. effect?? There are a lot of word pairings with meanings that Read more…
December 23, 2024
Spaghetto, paparazzo, and confetto may sound unnatural and strange to our ears, but they’re real singular words! The same goes for die, magum, and a bunch of other uncommon singular forms of plural words that we use all the time. Read more…
November 5, 2024
Most words have antonyms, which are “opposite” words. For example, the antonym of good is bad. An antonym of sad is happy. Then there are these super CONFUSING words called contronyms. These words are their OWN antonyms; they mean both Read more…