Welcome back to Pop Lexicon, The A.V. Club’s series with Kory Stamper, Merriam-Webster lexicographer and editor, where she reveals the origins of America’s favorite colloquialisms. In this video, Kory reveals the criminal history of “gangbusters,” a word first used in the early 20th century in reference to cops whose…
Ever since about 1996, grammatical sticklers are fought against the runaway freight train-esque popularity of “embiggen”—a perfectly cromulent word made famous by The Simpsons that was technically not a real word. Finally, though, Merriam-Webster has seen fit to add “embiggen” to its online dictionary, officially…
Welcome back to Pop Lexicon, The A.V. Club’s series with Kory Stamper, Merriam-Webster lexicographer and editor, where she reveals the origins of America’s favorite colloquialisms. In today’s edition, Kory tells us about the origins of the phrase “get medieval on your ass,” a threat made popular by Pulp Fiction.
So, turns out all we had to do to get the word “feminism” into the forefront of our pop-culture consciousness is elect a man who brags about assaulting women on tape and humiliates his female colleagues with threatening, sexualized comments as President of the United States of America. Good to know. It really would…
In Podmass, The A.V. Club sifts through the ever-expanding world of podcasts and recommends the previous week’s best episodes. Have your own favorite? Let us know in the comments or at podmass@avclub.com.
The war of words between Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un got positively esoteric today, with the Asian leader denouncing Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” who he would tame “with fire.” Kim’s statements came after Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and its “Rocket Man” leader…
Merriam-Webster, the dictionary known of late for its killer Twitter account, has added 250 new words and definitions to its pages of record. As usual with new words and definitions, they reveal a lot about the times that we live in, as these words and new meanings have to become widespread and sustained in written…
Every day, new words are added to the English language. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, and sometimes they’re codified as part of our cultural history by the fine folks updating our dictionaries. (A 2017 wishlist: Add the adjective “deadass” and ignore “bigly.”)
Sue is a Tyrannosaurus rex that resides in Chicago’s Field Museum, where the beast also apparently kills time on Twitter when not terrifying clusters of schoolchildren. A recent tweet asked its fans what they would like to see more of from the account.
If you’re someone who still thinks “fuck” is an acronym for “fornication under consent of the king,” then this video is probably for you. Here lexicographer and editor for Merriam-Webster Kory Stamper dives deep into the history of the word and other favorite swear words.
The dictionary and Donald Trump. Together they represent the bedrocks of our modern communication; without them, we would literally have nothing to say to each other, besides a bunch of primal grunts about how much we’re enjoying life. And yet, somehow the two cannot seem to get along. Trump and his associates misuse…
Among other crimes—including, hopefully, treason—Donald Trump is a sub-verbal human. He is the diametric opposite of our previous president, who appeared to speak and think in legal-dictionary paragraphs, with a few “folks” thrown in for good measure. Trump, on the other hand, emits words in a diarrheal effusion, with…
You can add recently appointed presidential adviser Ivanka Trump to the list of people who should probably look “burnt” up in the dictionary, courtesy of the social media team at Merriam-Webster. During a recent teaser for a CBS interview about her new role in the White House, Trump said she wasn’t sure what the word…
Hello, Gameologerinos, and welcome to our weekly thread for the discussion of weekend gaming plans and recent gaming glories. My plan this weekend is to continue trudging through Mass Effect: Andromeda for you, the dear readers, but when I’m not shooting aliens and gawking at glitches, I’m going to be dipping into …
“The dictionary” is one of those background items that’s always just there, little thought about and quickly forgotten after looking up a word. Those of us who deal with the English language for a living might appreciate a particularly illuminating definition, but the focus is always on the word itself, not on the…
Merriam-Webster saw a spike of lookups for the word “feminism” on its site yesterday, following Trump administration advisor Kellyanne Conway’s use of the word at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “It’s difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense,” she said, “because it seems to be very…
America still has much to learn from drag queens—gender being a social construct, for example, or the perils of hog body—but there’s one aspect of drag culture that has long since moved into the mainstream, and that’s the slang. Chief among these linguistic gifts is a new, many-layered meaning for the word “shade,” a…
Tweeting out definitions of words is now somehow political, as Merriam-Webster defines “fact” in the age of “alternative facts” and harnesses the power of its look-up data to explore the larger implications when a word like “demonstrator” gets extra attention. Today’s write-up of the meaning of “snowflake”—beyond the…
Merriam-Webster, the best dictionary on Twitter, would like to remind people what the definition of a fact is. One person in particular: Kellyanne Conway, counselor to Trump and parroter of falsehoods, who coined the term “alternative facts” in Meet The Press on Sunday.
Language reflects culture, which is perhaps why Merriam-Webster put out a call late last month to defeat “fascism.” The dictionary was trying to avoid having to name the term—which was experiencing a “what is the EU”-style resurgence in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory on November 8—as its word of the year, an award…
