When English-language Scrabble champ Nigel Richards, who does not speak French, won a French-language Scrabble championship, analysts rushed to analyze how much memorization that actually entailed. Ben Zimmer explains that to get a full understanding of Richards' achievement, a simple counting of words in the dictionary only gives a partial picture.  Continue reading...

We're in the middle of one of the most important transitions in a democracy: from one Batman to another. But as the era of Ben Affleck (Batfleck) rapidly approaches, former Batman Christian Bale recently offered wise words to his successor on how he should be able to relieve himself.  Continue reading...

Laughter is always good medicine, and today the Internet has put at our disposal the ability to draw it out through the combination in unexpected ways of two things that pervade modern culture: pictorial representation and vernacular language.  Continue reading...

Jan Schreiber, a noted poet, critic, and translator, notes that traversing the border between American and British dialects of English can reveal unexpected complexities. "The challenge, if we choose to pose and accept it, is to translate one into the other," he writes.  Continue reading...

For Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I look at the origins of an expression that turns nervousness and apprehension into a jokey malady: the heebie-jeebies. It turns out we can pin down not just the coiner but the very day that he coined the word.  Continue reading...

Years ago John Lennon declared the Beatles "more popular than Jesus"; he could have more accurately expressed their impact had he said they were more popular than Charles Dickens. Popularity on the Dickens/Beatles level means to be loved by virtually everyone in one's own and subsequent eras with heartfelt admiration and respect.  Continue reading...

Whether you like or loathe it, I bet you've noticed the return of –mentum: a suffix that fills the Internet during election season much as a sulfurous smell fills hell. This suffix is also a terrific reminder of a sad truth: the media will never, ever treat a presidential election as anything more than a sporting event with fewer concussions.  Continue reading...