As Americans celebrate Columbus Day, it's worth reflecting on the complicated cultural and linguistic legacy that Christopher Columbus left behind. There's a single word that aptly illustrates this legacy and all of its contradictions: Indians, the mistaken name that Columbus gave to the native peoples of the Americas.  Continue reading...

Here's a shocker: People don't talk the way they write, or the way they should write. They have accents; they slur words or runthemtogether. They leave off the "g" at the end of lots of words, and they mispronounce some, forgetting an "r" in "libary" or "Febuary."  Continue reading...

Browsing the shelves of a hushed private library recently, I came across a small book, Essays on Modern Novelists, by William Lyon Phelps. The author's name rang a faint bell, so I took the book down, blew off decades of dust, opened its stiff brown covers, and flipped through its yellowed pages, many of them still uncut.  Continue reading...

The Chicago Manual of Style Online has a monthly Q&A called Shop Talk, and this month Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, is featured. In the interview, Ben talks about the way that technology is shaping language and how sites like the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com can engage with "digital natives."  Continue reading...

There is nothing worse than feeling sick and having to write. (Well, feeling sick and having to lift bricks might come close.) If you ever face this problem, here are five tips.  Continue reading...

How can students use the Visual Thesaurus to evaluate Nick's objectivity as a narrator in The Great Gatsby?  Continue reading...

Peggy Parish's Amelia Bedelia has been a beloved children's character since her debut in 1963. Through many adventures (39 at last count) Amelia has approached any given task with wide eyed innocence, all the while misinterpreting the key word in a task to humorous and often disastrous effect.  Continue reading...