"Don't use big words."

Despite the well-meaning attempts of our teachers to help us develop a thorough grasp of English, we are constantly discouraged from venturing outside the narrow bounds of ordinary language.

Use a "vocabulary word" in class and feel the withering mockery of your classmates; drop a few sophisticated phrases into your presentation and watch someone accuse you of being pretentious or deliberately aiming to confuse. Oooh, using big words.  Continue reading...

I always hated Shakespeare.

They made me read him. First it was Julius Caesar. Then Romeo & Juliet, which was only cool because we wasted a week watching the movie. Next came Henry IV, Part One. I said, "You've got to be kidding," and scraped by on class discussions. The Bard and I were not friendly.

So how did I end up writing The Master of Verona, a novel based on his works?  Continue reading...

In the United Kingdom, the "nice decade" is over. When Bank of England governor Mervyn King announced recently that "the nice decade is behind us," he didn't mean that British pleasantness was at an end. Rather, he was using an acronym, NICE, which stands for "Non-Inflationary Consistent Expansion," a condition that King says has characterized the last ten years of British economic prosperity. One economist says the country is now heading into VILE years, playing off NICE with his own readymade acronym for "Volatile Inflation, Less Expansionary," while another says things are going to be EVIL ("Exacting period of Volatile Inflation and Low growth").

BBC News greets the end of the NICE decade with the question, "What's the point of niceness?" Was the acronym an appropriate one to label Britain's sustained economic boom, or is nice just too... nice?  Continue reading...

Which beers go best with recent works of fiction? Why not ask the writers themselves? Omnivoracious investigates, here and here.

When my son was 18 months, he suddenly started walking with a pronounced limp and he became wild whenever we tried to look at his foot. Concerned, and because it was a weekend, we took him to the emergency room at our local children's hospital. The emergency doc took one look at my son's foot and said, "Ah, he has a bad case of sleeper toe!"

This strange malady occurs when a piece of long hair or thread in the foot of a child's sleeper slowly works its way around the child's toe, essentially garroting it. Fortunately for us, the treatment was simple. It involved a team of big strong guys holding down my son and removing the hair. Not pleasant, but very effective.

I was recalling this incident the other day when it struck me that editing is essentially like being an ER doctor. Let me explain...  Continue reading...

When it comes to the printed (or electronic) word, design can be just as important as content. Here are some books to get you thinking about the "look" of language.

Thinking with Type

A Short History of the Printed Word

The Elements of Typographic Style

The End of Print

Last week on the Visual Thesaurus, William Safire and Nancy Friedman both weighed in on "Bittergate," the political furor that arose over Senator Barack Obama's comments about small-town Pennsylvanian voters ("It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion"). Now Obama has found himself under the microscope again for his use of a particular word, but this time the context is more "sweet" than "bitter." Responding to a question from television reporter Peggy Agar at an automobile plant outside of Detroit, Obama said, "Hold on one second, sweetie." Later he left Agar a voicemail apologizing about using the word sweetie to address her, calling it a "bad habit of mine." Lisa Anderson of the Chicago Tribune wryly wrote, "Welcome to 'Sweetie-gate,' a place paved with eggshells, where terms of endearment turn into political peccadilloes at the drop of a diminutive."  Continue reading...