Like is a powerful word. It's a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, and conjunction. It demonstrates preferences and shows relationships. It even acts as filler when we're trying to put our thoughts in order. Not all uses of like are equally accepted, however.  Continue reading...

Constance Hale, author of Sin and Syntax, has an entertaining new book out called Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing. Verbs, she writes, are "vital, vibrant, voluptuous, and, yes, sometimes vexing." In this excerpt, Hale focuses on choosing the right verbs, and avoiding getting confused by "headache verbs."  Continue reading...

Two of the longest sections in most grammar and style guides concern how to form plurals and how to form possessives. Some guidelines are identical—almost no plurals are formed with apostrophes, no matter how many "All Drink's Half Price" signs you see—and some disagree: Is the possessive form of "Texas" rendered as "Texas'" or "Texas's"?  Continue reading...

In last night's presidential debate, Barack Obama said that Mitt Romney's economic plan amounted to a "sketchy deal." Soon thereafter, #SketchyDeal was a trending topic on Twitter (in part thanks to the Obama campaign's own Twitter account), used to question or criticize various aspects of Romney's proposals. With sketchy in the spotlight, it's worth sketching out how the word came to prominence, and how it can mean different things to different people.  Continue reading...

Today is National Dictionary Day, celebrating the birth of lexicographer Noah Webster, who wrote An American Dictionary of the English Language, which defined an American version of the English lexicon for the first time. To celebrate, let us know your favorite all-American word.  Continue reading...

Your computer's keyboard has around 110 keys by which you can make your wishes known to the machine. Most of these have obvious labels: if you press the A key, the letter A appears on the screen. Some are less obvious, though — the Shift key and the mysterious Ctrl key — and in this article I'll explore why they're named what they're named.  Continue reading...

In last night's vice-presidential debate, there was one clear winner: the word malarkey. Joe Biden used it not once but twice against Paul Ryan. First, in responding to Ryan's criticism of the Obama administration's handling of last month's attacks in Benghazi, he told Ryan, "With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey." And then later, Biden euphemistically called Ryan's rhetoric "a bunch of stuff" before clarifiying, "We Irish call it malarkey."  Continue reading...