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Was Rand Paul's Plagiarism Dishonest Or A Breach Of Good Form?

Even taken together, the charges didn't seem to amount to that big a deal — just a matter of quoting a few factual statements and a Wikipedia passage without attributing them. But as Rand Paul...

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Narcissistic Or Not, 'Selfie' Is Nunberg's Word Of The Year

I feel a little defensive about choosing "selfie" as my Word of the Year for 2013. I've usually been partial to words that encapsulate one of the year's major stories, such as " occupy " or " big data...

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Sorry Assiduous (adj.) SAT-Takers, Linguist In Dudgeon (n.) Over Vocab...

When I took the SATs a very long time ago, it didn't occur to us to cram for the vocabulary questions. Back then, the A in SAT still stood for "aptitude," and most people accepted the wholesome fiction...

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Hackers? Techies? What To Call San Francisco's Newcomers

"There goes the neighborhood." Every so often that cry goes up in San Francisco, announcing a new chapter in American cultural history, as the rest of the country looks on. There were the beats in...

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150 Years After Marx, 'Capital' Still Can't Shake Loose Of 'Das Kapital'

A lot of things had to come together to turn Thomas Piketty's controversial Capital in the Twenty-First Century into the tome of the season . There's its timeliness, its surprising accessibility and...

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Do Feelings Compute? If Not, The Turing Test Doesn't Mean Much

To judge from some of the headlines, it was a very big deal. At an event held at the Royal Society in London, for the first time ever, a computer passed the Turing Test, which is widely taken as the...

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Feeling Watched? 'God View' Is Geoff Nunberg's Word Of The Year

"Infobesity," "lumbersexual," "phablet." As usual, the items that stand out as candidates for word of the year are like its biggest pop songs, catchy but ephemeral. But even a fleeting expression can...

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Don't You Dare Use 'Comprised Of' On Wikipedia: One Editor Will Take It Out

I think of English usage as one of those subjects like cocktails or the British royal family. A lot of people take a passing interest in it but you never know who's going to turn out to be a true...

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From TED Talks To Taco Bell, Abuzz With Silicon Valley-Style 'Disruption'

HBO's Silicon Valley is back, with its pitch-perfect renderings of the culture and language of the tech world — like at the opening of the "Disrupt" startup competition run by the Tech Crunch website...

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What's A Thamakau? Spelling Bee Is More About Entertainment Than English

We English-speakers take a perverse pride in the orneriness of our spelling, which is one reason why the spelling bee has been a popular entertainment since the 19th century. It's fun watching...

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Tracing The Origin Of The Campaign Promise To 'Tell It Like It Is'

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So, What's The Big Deal With Starting A Sentence With 'So'?

To listen to the media tell it, "so" is busting out all over — or at least at the beginning of a sentence. New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas calls "so" the new "um" and "like"; others call it...

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Goodbye Jobs, Hello 'Gigs': How One Word Sums Up A New Economic Reality

The obvious candidates for word of the year are the labels of the year's big stories — new words like " microaggression " or resurgent ones like " refugees ." But sometimes a big theme is captured in...

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Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Not

Talk about belated recognition. At its meeting in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 7, the American Dialect Society voted to make the 600-year-old pronoun "they" their word of the year for 2015. Or more...

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Changes To French Spelling Make Us Wonder: Why Is English So Weird?

The French have gotten themselves into one of their recurrent linguistic lathers , this one over the changes in their spelling that will be taking effect in the fall. The changes were originally...

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Irked By The Way Millennials Speak? 'I Feel Like' It's Time To Loosen Up

"The way kids speak today, I'm here to tell you." Over the course of history, every aging generation has made that complaint , and it has always turned out to be overblown. That's just as well. If the...

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Is Trump's Call For 'Law And Order' A Coded Racial Message?

"I am the law-and-order candidate." With that proclamation in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump made it official that he'd be recycling the themes and language of Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. A lot...

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A Resurgence Of 'Redneck' Pride, Marked By Race, Class And Trump

Wherever you look, this is the year of white working-class males — or, as Donald Trump describes them, "the smart, smart, smart people that don't have the big education." Who are they, and why are they...

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Not Fit To Print? When Politicians Talk Dirty, Media Scramble To Sanitize

It has become a familiar story in a world bristling with live mics. A public figure is caught out using a vulgarity, and the media have to decide how to report the remark. Web media tend to be...

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'Normal': The Word Of The Year (In A Year That Was Anything But)

It's been an unusual political year, to put it mildly, and you could write most of its story just by tracking its effects on the lexicon — the new words and new uses of old ones, some useful, some that...

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