Verbal Energy
October 24, 2004
While the Word Spy site is great in theory, there hasn't been a new word posted to it since I integrated the RSS feed into the englishrules.com Writing Resources page a few months ago. So, I'm stripping it from the page to make way for my new favorite grammar blog, Verbal Energy, which appears as a column written by Ruth Walker in the Christian Science Monitor. Now, whenever a new article from Verbal Energy is posted, its title will automatically appear in the right-hand column of my writing resources page.
According to the Christian Science Monitor's web site, Verbal Energy is a "blog about words and grammar from the Monitor's copy editor extraordinaire." So visit it, bookmark it, and read it with glee. It's fun and witty and perceptive.
Here is an excerpt from one of her recent articles, The Other "L" Word:
An observation during the closing weeks of this current presidential campaign: What a rich vocabulary the English language has for suggesting — without explicitly saying — that someone is lying.
That's "lying" as in "fibbing." Saying things that aren't so. Telling falsehoods with the intent to deceive. Practicing mendacity. Indulging in willful obfuscation. Prevarication. See what I mean?
...A liar is what we are taught early on not to be. It's also a word we're taught to be very careful with in applying to others. And yet so many in the public square are being so selective with so-called "facts" that we're all starting to develop elaborate vocabularies to hold politicians and their spinmeisters to account without using the "L" word.
See what I mean?
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Nov 9, 2004 ; 7:50 PM