There's an old saying in real estate: the three most important things about a property are location, location, location. This month in the Language Lounge we discover that the same holds true for English syntax. We take a look at what happens when elements of a sentence get accidentally waylaid.  Continue reading...

The modern, and somewhat cynical line on poets is that they should not quit their day jobs. Poet pay is dismal or nonexistent; the opportunities for contemporary recognition, minuscule; and the chances for posthumous celebration, hardly to be taken seriously. We’re taking a contrarian view in the Lounge this month, as we dust off the Poetry Corner and pay a visit to a poet who never really had a day job, but who left an enduring imprint on the language, echoes of which can still be heard every day throughout the wide world of English.  Continue reading...

A sighting of a "corrections institution" has us thinking about the gamut of terms used for the punishment end of the criminal justice system.  Continue reading...

The great secret of success in anything is to get a hearing. Half the object is gained when the audience is assembled.
—Phineas T. Barnum

Now that you're all here: it seems a suitable time to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of P. T. Barnum — a name that you probably don't associate with language in a particular way.  Continue reading...

In the Language Lounge, we raise a toast to words that are celebrating their golden jubilee, having made their first appearance in print a half century ago, in the heady days of 1960.  Continue reading...

A specter is haunting English — the specter of abused quotation marks. We notice this more and more in our reading and editing in the Lounge: the unthinking or misguided use of quotation marks where they are not required or serve no clear purpose seems to have become epidemic, perhaps nowhere more so than in the recently well-publicized open letter that the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers posted on the team's website, in which he responded to star player Lebron James' move to another team.  Continue reading...

This month in the Language Lounge, we take a look at an underappreciated grammatical category: submodifiers. We hope that by shining the spotlight briefly on the term, we might win over a few converts, as well as alert readers to the nuances of the delightful class of words so designated.  Continue reading...