Vocabulary
Snappy Words
Snappy: quick, lively, interactive, energetic, zippy…
Words: concepts, meanings, dictionary, thesaurus, connections, associations,…
SNAPPY WORDS is a visual thesaurus which allows you to display a map of words and concepts and its meanings and draw connections to associated words by simply placing the mouse cursor over them or clicking on them.
To display its connections, the site allegedly uses an online lexical database, but the associations tend to be over-simplified and lack complexity and in-depth awareness of collocations and nuances, as Hugh Dellar points out in his post about the site. Try looking up the word LOVE, see what you think…
Linguee
LINGUEE is a useful translation tool which combines an editorial dictionary with a search engine. It displays example sentences from online sources to illustrate how a particular expression or word chunk has been translated in context. It currently provides texts and translations for English words in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese. Translated texts usually come from professionally translated websites of companies, organizations, universities, and other valuable sources such as EU documents and patent specifications.
It has helped me find a good translation for a term I’ve come across lately : “slush funds”. Oh well, the economy again…
Euphemania
In Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms, author and speaker Ralph Keyes explores the wonderful world of euphemisms and why we say what we say instead of what we mean. It contains several sections covering different areas: Comestibles, Speaking of sex, Liquidity, Words of war…From Variety meats or Family jewels to Leverage or Friendly fire.
Yours Truly, 