'Austerity' is 2010 Word of the Year

Not many of us pay attention to our vocabulary. What words we often use, what words are newly coined, and what words are added to the dictionary.

Through the years, words get listed on the dictionary while others got removed mainly due to its reach, use, or lack of it. And little did we know that words are also good signs of the times. :D

Take for example the word 'Austerity.' It is declared as the 2010 Word of the Year. Here's why:

Austerity, the 14th century noun defined as "the quality or state of being austere" and "enforced or extreme economy," set off enough searches that Merriam-Webster named it as its Word of the Year for 2010, the dictionary's editors announced Monday.

John Morse, president and publisher of the Springfield, Mass.-based dictionary, said "austerity" saw more than 250,000 searches on the dictionary's free online tool and came with more coverage of the debt crisis.

"What we look for ... what are the words that have had spikes that strike us very much as an anomaly for their regular behavior," Morse said. "The word that really qualifies this year for that is 'austerity'."

Source

The Student Theme

by Ronald Wallace

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.

"The Student Theme" by Ronald Wallace, from The Uses of Adversity. © The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

Via: The Writer's Almanac

Censorship and Word Choice

I chanced upon this post on Six Sentences and I thought of how censorship can sometimes hinder us from expressing how we feel and see things. :)

Click here to see what I mean.

Advice v. Advise

Many of you may be aware that these two words exist, but don't know how to distinguish one from the other. I often see the two being used interchangeably.

Advice
This is the noun form, which according to Dictionary.com means an opinion or recommendation offered as a guide to action. Example:

My father always give me good advice.

Following my neighbor's advice, I cleaned up my surroundings to get rid of dengue-carrying mosquitoes.

Advise
This is the verb from, which according to Dictionary.com means to give counsel to, offer an opinion or recommendation or suggestion worth following. Example:

The doctor advised him against eating too much chocolates.

My parents advised us when they would be arriving.