THE EVER EXPANDING DICTIONARY. Surely, one of the whimsical, wonderful things about the English language is its flexibility. New words Christened by Merrian-Webster this year include “ginormous” (gigantic + enormous) and “crunk” (a style of Southern rap).

–Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.