"My students have been saying it correctly all the time, and I've been telling them that they were wrong," said Maria de Conceição. She had her head in her hands and, while not looking exactly disheartened, she did look somewhat perplexed. She was one of twenty Portuguese teachers of English who were showing pluck and determination by sitting through a twenty-five hour training course with me, and we had been looking at the alarming variety of ways of saying many high-frequency words in English.  Continue reading...

As my sons Doug and Adam have spent more time surfing the Internet, they've seen plenty of examples of people leaving insulting comments on Facebook pages or YouTube videos just to get a reaction out of other people, who don't realize they're being played. They've also picked up the vocabulary for this kind of behavior: trolling. I've been familiar with the concept of trolling for 20 years now, but it turns out to have undergone some changes during that time.  Continue reading...

If there's one thing that dictionary publishers have learned, it's that announcing new words added to their latest editions is good for generating some media attention — and also generating public hand-wringing over what the new entries say about the state of our society and our language.  Continue reading...

How can students define important Social Studies doctrines and identify these ism's in action throughout history and current events?  Continue reading...

We're all familiar with those words that modify nouns. Words like big, yellow, northern, and government. They're called adjectives, and their job is to modify the nouns they're next to.

Government?  Continue reading...

In two recent articles, The New York Times has reported on culture wars involving "hipsters": locals in the Long Island town of Montauk are suffering from "hipster fatigue," while in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the hipsters are battling with new parents and their babies. All of this raises the question: where did the term hipster come from? Does it have something to do with hippies? And what about the even older term, hepcat?  Continue reading...

What does a Hanseatic city have to do with America's most popular sandwich? How is the city of Mozart related to a ballpark favorite? And how did the names of these cities end up as common and productive English words? It's all because of Americans' love for an ethnic food that's so much a part of our diet that we might not even realize it's ethnic: namely, German cuisine.  Continue reading...