This is the deal: Every time we use a linguistic word or phrase that appeared in a newspaper, a magazine, or on the radio in the last week, we’ll pull out that column from the archive. We’ll also track it in the News Apple Reminder and the list of articles you’ll find when you click here. Best of all, no English dictionary will be required, just the Times’ blog archive.
When a word is incorrectly identified, we’ll offer a fix. (Please check this link at the bottom to make sure the word in question is correct.)
There’s no more fun time of the week than a quiz week, and we want to kick things off with some food for thought. It’s not uncommon for readers to respond to an article and say something like, “You wrote that as if it were the New York Times. I must have misspelled it.” For the most part, this is a soundly fair complaint. The question was asked, not the newspaper it appeared in. But sometimes, it’s the case that a single word can be mistranslated from foreign countries into a language that is a dead ringer for the original. Perhaps we can confirm that claim before you take the next piece.
Please don’t underestimate the humanity of a staff-created quiz, though. Even though this makes our shows look pretty easy, a quiz has its share of hard moments. Sure, the correct response to a correctly pronounced question is probably “a,” but sometimes you have to think about things like “aha” or “do” and think about ways to come up with the correct response. (For example, it seems appropriate to add the first letter of the four letters “p-b-u-l-e” as a complete response.)
Please continue to submit your questions as a regular reader, or with your email address here. We’ll update this blog periodically with your answers.
J, a
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J, a
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J, a
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J, a
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(You can follow our live-tweeting on Twitter with the hashtag #NYNYWhispers.)