Last week on NPR's Morning Edition, sports commentator Frank Deford said in a piece about Serena Williams and her volatile style that "the proof is in the pudding." After a listener questioned the usage, I was called in to be the arbiter on the idiomatic expression. Is the proof in the pudding? Or is the proof of the pudding in the eating?  Continue reading...

At a summer journalism workshop, young writers were thrown into the deep end of the pool but came up with impressive results. Bob Greenman recounts how the high school students that he taught proved up to the task of becoming dogged reporters.  Continue reading...

Cities that have hard winters have no "alternative" and must repair roads in the summer. And when they do, they need to provide motorists with "alternate" routes.

That sentence illustrates the difference between "alternative" and "alternate."  Continue reading...

Can a simple slangy acronym mark a generation gap? YOLO, short for "You Only Live Once," has emerged as an age-based shibboleth: all too familiar to members of the millennial set, and all but meaningless to their elders. In my latest Boston Globe column, I dissect the YOLO phenomenon, but there's much more to say about those four letters.  Continue reading...

We were, needless to say, absolutely thrilled to learn that the Visual Thesaurus has inspired a short film, fittingly titled, "Word Cloud." The film was created by Claire Scholz of Rapid City, South Dakota, and stars Claire and her granddaughter Anna. It was prepared for a local family-run film festival, and we're honored to feature it here on our site as well.  Continue reading...

Another week, another update from a dictionary publisher reflecting recent additions to the lexicon. Last week, it was Merriam-Webster rolling out new words, including such eyebrow-raisers as f-bomb and sexting. Now comes Oxford Dictionaries Online with their quarterly update, making space for some trendy neologisms, including lolz, ridic, and the nefarious mwahahaha.  Continue reading...