Hyphen Takes a Knockout Blow

Words like "mankini", "murse", and "mewlery" are becoming ever-more popular

(NEWSER) - Fashion Week is here again, which gives the Wall Street Journal an excuse to look at the "special lexicon" that has cemented itself in the mainstream of the men's fashion world in recent years. Mankinis, mandals, manties, murses, and even mantyhose—the growing list of items that were once female and are now certifiably androgynous is causing quite a stir. These semantic hybridizations have been a response to a male fashion sales boom, though many think throwing "man" in front of words associated with women's fashion is off-putting and emasculating. More»

It's official: 'Jeggings' is a word

(NEWSER) - Language purists, avert your eyes: The Oxford English Dictionary has added some new words. Here they are, along with the Daily Mirror 's helpful definitions:

• Mankini: "The revealing male bathing costume made famous by Sacha Baron Cohen in his Borat film."
• Retweet: "Sharing a Twitter message."

Grammar nerds rallied to defense of serial comma

(NEWSER) - Grammar fiends took a ride on an emotional roller coaster this week on news, erroneous as it turned out, that Oxford University was ditching its famous comma rule. (It requires a comma before the word "and" in a series: Not "a, b and c" but "a, b, and c.") Writers rallied to the rule's defense, including Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon . It "is one of the sanest punctuation usages in the written language," she writes. "It gives each element of a series its own distinct place in it, instead of lumping the last two together in one hasty breath." More»

Justices citing definitions more and more in decisions

(NEWSER) - John Roberts may be the chief justice of the United States, but he recently pulled out a dictionary to learn the meaning of “of” for a ruling. Justices are looking more and more to dictionaries to help them settle cases—a trend that worries both legal experts and dictionary makers, the New York Times reports. “I think that it’s probably wrong, in almost all situations, to use a dictionary in the courtroom,” says an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Among the words looked up: "now," "if," and even "attorney." More»

It's overused and inefficient: Noreen Malone

(NEWSER) - Might one overused punctuation threaten the integrity of modern prose? Noreen Malone thinks so, and she points to the em dash as culprit. But wait, "doesn't a dash—if done right—let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?" she asks in her anti-em-dash essay at Slate . "Nope—or that's my take anyway." Malone laments overuse of the em dash because "it discourages truly efficient writing" and disrupts sentence flow. "Don't you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won't be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that's not yet complete?" More»