We have three very interesting readings about language for this week. The first is about the enduring value of the much-maligned cliché in our daily interactions with other people, the second about a more reliable way of finally finding the word that’s already at the tip of your tongue, and the third about how human nature turned the word “immediately” into history’s longest thesaurus entry.
In “Let us now praise... the cliché,”
Globe correspondent James Parker writes in the paper’s October 18, 2009 issue that although writers have always been extra-spooked by clichés, there’s much to be thankful for that they are around to help us express our ideas quickly. “Durable, easily handled, yet retaining somehow the flavor of its coinage, the classic cliché has fought philology to a standstill: it sticks and it stays, and not by accident,” he says in its defense.
Read James Parker’s “Let us now praise... the cliché” in the Globe now!In “In search of that word on the tip of your tongue,” an article written for the October 18, 2009 issue of
USA Today, Dan Vergano reports that the difficulty often stems from the fact that the tip of the tongue may not be the right place to look for that elusive word to begin with. He says that psychologists have found that deaf, sign-language speakers may hold the key to finding precisely where those words are hiding.
Read Dan Vergano’s “In search of that word…” in USA Today now!In “How human nature turned one word into history's longest thesaurus entry,” an article written by Valentine Low for the October 23, 2009 issue of
Times UK, we find that people came up with 265 different ways of saying “immediately” because of the all-too-human tendency to procrastinate. “A lot of the words that once meant ‘immediately’ came to mean ‘soon’,” says Professor Christian Kay, a project member of the new
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, “so you then needed another word that really meant ‘immediately.’ ‘Soon’, for instance— its original meaning was ‘immediately.’”
Read “How human nature turned one word…” in the Times UK now!
