As the most ravenous euphemism-hunter in North America, I sometimes have to act quickly and without mercy. Euphemisms are cunning — always hiding under rocks, burrowing themselves in dictionaries that fell into ravines, or appearing on wavelengths blocked by the tin-foil hat that nice man from Mars helped me assemble into a Helmet of Awesomeness and Security.  Continue reading...

When Margaret Hundley Parker teaches writing at the college level, she finds that the papers submitted by students often fall prey to the most basic errors of presentation. Here she reveals five persistent formatting flaws in student papers and explains how to fix them.  Continue reading...

"In difficult times fashion is always outrageous," the Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli famously said. But come hard times or good times, you can always count on fashion writing to be an excessive, outrageous genre unto itself. Where else but in fashion copy would destructed be an acceptable — indeed, comprehensible — adjective? Who but a fashion editor would bully her readers with imperatives such as must-have? And what on earth is one supposed to make of cryptic abbreviations like cardi, bodycon, and MOTG?  Continue reading...

April is National Poetry Month! Bring some poetry into your classroom with one of these Visual Thesaurus lesson plans.  Continue reading...

In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, I take on some modern meanings of social and related words like socialize. (Have you been in a meeting where someone has suggested socializing an idea?) We owe much of the recent rise of social-ity to those trendy online terms, social media and social networking. How did we manage to get so social simply by staring into our laptop screens?  Continue reading...

We've been exploring the online presence of companies recently in the Lounge. The language that companies use to present their public face has piqued our curiosity and we've been thinking about what purpose these self-reports from companies serve.  Continue reading...

The Associated Press style guide has given its official imprimatur to "The Great Recession" as a description for the global financial crisis that started in late 2007. Many other news organizations, particularly those in Europe, think that the AP is jumping the gun. Kathlyn Clore of the European Journalism Centre reports here.