It's time for the second WordMasters Challenge of the school year! Click here for details.

New York, New York. It's my favorite city in the world, and I recently returned from a visit there accompanied by my husband and son, both first time visitors to the Big Apple. We had a blast.

We saw three Broadway shows, toured the UN, the Guggenheim, the Met and the MOMA (yes, my son is long-suffering) and walked the magnificent High Line in Chelsea.  Continue reading...

Students are aware that their bicycles contain two wheels and that their friends' all-terrain vehicles are called quads, but have they ever stopped to consider how Latin roots and prefixes have shaped those words?  Continue reading...

Literature is everywhere. Well, literary allusions are everywhere, that is.

Students of today live in a time where they have always known cable television, computers and cell phones. Movies come in the mail or via the Wii. Yet that doesn’t mean the classics of literature have faded away. They are around — often referenced in new forms or adapted completely.  Continue reading...

The year is still young, but I’m prepared to go out on a limb and declare 2011 the Year of the Q-Name. From Quid to Quora, from Qajack to Qire, from Qrank to Qponomics, Q names are the queens and kings (qings?) of contemporary naming. Evidence? On CrunchBase, a directory of technology companies, I counted 405 Q names. And that was after eliminating companies that incorporate place names like Qatar and Qingdao.  Continue reading...

Last fall, Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer wrote here and in his New York Times column about writers who use a we voice when truly they are I's writing personal opinions. In a few cases, Zimmer wrote, he'd accept using the plural pronoun for the singular, officially called nosism, from nos, we in Latin, but in general he deplored the practice. Using we for I opens writers up to "charges of gutlessness and self-importance," Zimmer wrote; "the we disease...continues to infect many written genres."  Continue reading...

The Pittsburgh Steelers meet the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl this weekend, and the Washington Post has a guide to Pittsburgh and Wisconsin lingo. Steelers fans might say, "Redd up the house, company's comin!" A Packers touchdown might be greeted with "Uff-da!" Read all about it here.