November 12th isn't a public holiday, but perhaps it should be. On this day in 1990, a memorandum was produced by the English physicist Tim Berners-Lee and the Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau while working for CERN in Geneva. Entitled "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project," it might not have seemed so earth-shattering at the time. But it set into motion the Age of the Web: it's hard to overestimate the impact this document has had on our chronically wired culture — and on our language. Continue reading...

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, and linguist Neal Whitman has been thinking about a question of military usage: if "50,000 troops" refers to 50,000 people, then does "one troop" refer to one person? Continue reading...

It's in bad taste to make fun of your followers. It tends to discourage, you know, the following. Still, I can't resist gently heckling one of my recent Twitter followers who described herself as: "Newly married humom of the two cutest dogs in Twitterverse and beyond." Continue reading...

In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, I take a look at how the car brand Cadillac remains an emblem of luxury, even though Cadillac itself is no longer really "the Cadillac of cars." In the health care debate on Capitol Hill, we frequently hear high-cost health insurance plans described as "Cadillac plans." And there's another area of American culture where Cadillac continues to have outsized linguistic importance: baseball. Continue reading...

Do you know what it means to dogfood a product? Have you ever taken part in a bug bash? Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, takes us on a tour of some of the quirky jargon that has sprung up at the software giant. Continue reading...

In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, I delve into the history of the title Ms. used as a marriage-neutral title for women. As I revealed here on Word Routes back in June, the earliest known proposal for the modern use of Ms. appeared in the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican on November 10, 1901. And as the proposal reemerged over the ensuing decades, two nagging questions kept getting asked: how do you pronounce it, and what does it stand for? Continue reading...