We welcome back Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland who writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First. Here Stan cuts through the red tape to take a long look at the word bureaucracy.  Continue reading...

This past weekend I was pleased to take part in the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society, held this year in Philadelphia. I was on a lively panel entitled "Your Grammar Questions Answered," with Merrill Perlman, who managed the copy desks at The New York Times for many years, and Bill Walsh, multiplatform editor for The Washington Post. For an hour and half, the ACES crowd peppered us with all manner of grammar questions, from the well-worn to the unexpected.  Continue reading...

Several times throughout this school year, I've filled readers in on what's been going on in my Beginning Playwriting classroom, an 11th grade level class I introduced this year at my school. You can read about those updates here and here. At the end of March, we finished up the test run of this class with a final production, and I thought you'd like to read a bit about that experience as well as my final (for now) thoughts about why Playwriting belongs in the classroom. Call this my 11 o'clock number!  Continue reading...

The volcano in Iceland that has disrupted European air travel goes by the impenetrable name Eyjafjallajökull. Don't know how to pronounce it? Neither does anyone else outside of Iceland. Mark Liberman of Language Log presents some outsiders' failed attempts, as well as proper pronunciations from actual Icelanders, here.

For this Sunday's "Health and Wellness" issue of The New York Times Magazine, I've contributed an "On Language" column looking at how we all started talking about wellness (as opposed to health) in the first place. The word has had an odd trajectory: from an occasional antonym of illness dating back to the 17th century, to an uneasy label for preventive and holistic approaches to health in the '70s and '80s, to an established element of our linguistic landscape in the '90s and beyond.  Continue reading...

The annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society is in full swing, held this year in Philadelphia. Among the panels is one devoted to grammar questions, featuring Visual Thesaurus editor and New York Times language columnist Ben Zimmer. Even if you're not in Philly, you can follow the action on the ACES blog.

How can a few good words save a pig's life?  Continue reading...