The outrage over new security procedures enforced by the Transportation Security Administration has thrust the word pat-down into the news. Airline passenger screenings in the U.S. now involve full-body scans, or if the passenger refuses the scan, a full-body pat-down. While the TSA faces backlash against these so-called "enhanced pat-downs" (an unfortunate term reminiscent of "enhanced interrogation techniques" at Guantanamo), plain-old pat-downs have been part of the lexicon of law enforcement for decades.  Continue reading...

Writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker has a dark secret she has to reveal.

Here's my confession: In the summer, I don't care about rules. I pen prose that would give a good copy editor a heart attack. I don't mind if someone "lays" down for a nap, I get in the line for "ten items or less" and refrain from muttering fewer under my breath. The news "impacts"people and I don't flinch. It's very liberating. The down side of all this is when friends—or worse, new acquaintances—ask me word questions and I give wrong answers. It's not that I do a brain cleanse every June, it's that I can't articulate the rules when I'm not really thinking about them.  Continue reading...

November 23rd has been named Fibonacci Day since 11-23 doubles as the date's abbreviation and the first numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence (1, 1, 2, 3...). The Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci used this sequence in lots of wacky ways--from predicting the population growth of rabbits to exploring the "golden ratio" formed between two consecutive numbers in the sequence.  Continue reading...

There's a new campaign to boost awareness of U.S. public libraries that goes by the curious name, "Geek the Library." I'm all for the campaign's stated mission of improving public perceptions of libraries by championing their importance to local communities. But what really fascinates me is the way they're using geek as a transitive verb to mean "be geekily enthusiastic about." I guess you could say I geek innovative uses of the word geek.  Continue reading...

We welcome back Merrill Perlman, who writes the "Language Corner" column for Columbia Journalism Review. Here she considers how "scapegoat" gets turned into "escape goat" — an error that actually has an etymological basis.  Continue reading...

The Dictionary of American Regional English is a sprawling, monumental reference work, with a fifth and final volume scheduled for publication in 2011. But if you want a daily dose of DARE goodness, just follow the dictionary's Twitter feed! The Twitter handle is @DAREwords.

Last spring the New York Times reported that more and more grammar vigilantes are showing up on Twitter to police the typos and grammar mistakes that they find on users' tweets. According to the Times, the tweet police "see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette," and some of them go so far as to write algorithms that seek out tweets gone wrong.  Continue reading...