Liesl schillinger biography of barack

ABOVE: LIESL SCHILLINGER IN NEW YORK, OCTOBER PHOTO BY BRIAN HIGBEE.

Where do new words come from? How do they come to have regular play on our tongues?

Many of the neologisms that have been added to our contemporary lexicon seem to have been invented either by teenagers or advertising firms—staycation, humble brag—and have their moment as a passing trend before fading off into vocabulary oblivion.

Liesl schillinger biography of barack obama

Certainly social media has brought so many of these new entries into existence, while deleting older terms—mimeograph or Xerox or telex—as their namesake technologies disappear. Thankfully, one obscenely clever wordsmith has taken to creating her own ongoing dictionary of necessary words as her avocation.

Writer, critic, translator, and literary impresario Liesl Schillinger began collecting her own coinages on a Tumblr account in Titled Wordbirds, the blog offered wicked, etymologically choice words that had yet to find voic