Have you noticed that curators, once restricted to institutions like museums and art galleries, are now running rampant? Research librarian Stan Friedman investigates curator-mania, and discovers that people are finding comfort in an old, trusted term.  Continue reading...

“Stop and think!” was a phrase deployed numerous times an hour by a former co-teacher, when we worked together in a preschool classroom. Whether it was a girl about to try to eat some sand from the sand table, or a boy seconds away from hurling himself off of the top of a slide, “Stop and think!” would ring out.  Continue reading...

How do you feel about the phrase due to? Does it just mean "attributable to" to you, or can it also mean "because of"? Your answer may help explain where you fall along the prescriptivism-descriptivism usage continuum.  Continue reading...

My mother and sister seem to take more pleasure than the average bear in saying things like, "It was he" and "This is she."

Actually, the average bear takes NO pleasure in saying such things because the average bear doesn't say them; the average bear says, "It was him" and "You got 'er."  Continue reading...

It's time once again to break out the holiday eggnog! Ever wonder where the word eggnog comes from? Wonder no more: check out the Word Routes column that Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer wrote last holiday season, "The Origins of 'Eggnog,' Holiday Grog."

Last week, an exciting new tool for analyzing the history of language and culture was unveiled by Google. They call it the "Ngram Viewer," and it's an interface to study the enormous corpus of historical texts scanned by Google Books. The Ngram Viewer was rolled out in conjunction with a paper in the journal Science introducing the field of "culturomics." Dennis Baron has weighed in on the significance of this development for researchers. But what about those peculiar words, culturomics and ngram?  Continue reading...

We are pleased to present another excerpt from the new anthology entitled, One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe, published by Sarabande Books. The editor, Molly McQuade, asked 66 writers the question, "What one word means the most to you, and why?" Among the essays McQuade has collected is "Interesting," by Jayson Iwen.  Continue reading...