If you feel that lack of willpower has contributed to your difficulty with writing, then follow some tips from The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal. Writing coach Daphne Gray-Grant found inspiration from the book, even inspiring her to find the willpower to write this column.  Continue reading...

Lead is the name of a metallic element. Pronounced a different way, it's a verb meaning to take someone somewhere. But the past tense of the verb, led, sounds like the name of the metallic element. Confusing enough? Let Julia Rubiner clear up the situation, with a little help from rock legends Led Zeppelin.  Continue reading...

Communication — from the Latin "cum unio," union with — is the big answer humans have come up with to break us out of lifelong solitary confinement and link us up with other beings. Communication's content, the specific information sent or received, can be of life-or-death importance, but beneath the content, there's the bond, the union with, that communication creates, whether the content is "I love you" or "I hate you."  Continue reading...

August is Connected Educators Month, and to celebrate, the New York Times Learning Network has rounded up 33 educators to explain who is in their "Personal Learning Network" (PLN). Among those responding are Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer and curriculum development director Georgia Scurletis. Check out all the responses here.

"The whole nine yards," meaning "the full extent of something," remains one of the most puzzling idioms for word-watchers. Everyone seems to have their own explanation for where the expression comes from, and yet there is still no definitive origin story for it. This is surprising for a phrase that's not terribly old: scattered uses can be found from the 1960s, and now it's been pushed back a bit earlier, to 1956.  Continue reading...

When I'm looking for rare euphemisms to include in this column, I don't turn to drink, but I do turn to Drunk: The Definitive Drinker's Dictionary. Paul Dickson's amazing collection of 2,964 terms for being tipsy, lubricated, guzzled, or uncorked is a euphemism-palooza.  Continue reading...

Teach a computer to recognize some rules about language, develop algorithms for computers to apply to big buckets of text, and before you know it, computers may be able to tell you things about language or extracted from language that you didn't know before, or that the writer didn't suspect he or she was revealing.  Continue reading...