For the second year in a row, the Visual Thesaurus helped out the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses with its annual Spelling Bee to support the work of independent literary publishers. Once again, the VT supplied the words that challenged some of the leading lights of the New York publishing world.  Continue reading...

In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, I delve into the history of the title Ms. used as a marriage-neutral title for women. As I revealed here on Word Routes back in June, the earliest known proposal for the modern use of Ms. appeared in the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican on November 10, 1901. And as the proposal reemerged over the ensuing decades, two nagging questions kept getting asked: how do you pronounce it, and what does it stand for?  Continue reading...

My wife recently spotted the following perplexing line on Crabtree & Evelyn's website, advertising their hand soap:

Our gentle cleansing liquid soaps are pH-balanced and soap-free.

That's right, they're selling soap-free soap. I've heard of a "nothing-burger," but "nothing-soap"?  Continue reading...

When Columbus arrived in the New World 517 years ago, this pivotal moment of cultural contact was fraught with misunderstanding. Upon finding the native Lucayans on the small Caribbean island where he made landfall, Columbus dubbed them Indians, under the mistaken impression that he had navigated all the way to the eastern shores of Asia. Explorers and cartographers quickly figured out that Columbus was utterly mistaken, and yet even now his monumental error lives on in the word Indian to refer to indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.  Continue reading...

It was all over the news yesterday: according to a new poll from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, whatever is the word that Americans find most annoying. The poll asked respondents which word or phrase bothered them the most, and whatever easily swamped the competition, with 47 percent naming it the most annoying. You know came in at 25 percent, it is what it is at 11 percent, anyway at 7 percent, and at the end of the day at 2 percent. Despite the widespread media attention, we should ask: does this poll really tell us anything useful?  Continue reading...

In this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I take over the "On Language" spot to pay tribute to the man who originated the column, William Safire. (You can already read the online version here.) It's not quite as personal as the remembrance I posted here after learning of Safire's death, but it's no less heartfelt. As preparation, I took a stroll through some of the thousands of columns that Safire produced over three decades, focusing especially on his first year of language punditry, 1979. Though many of his early columns stand the test of time, one example where he was less than on-target had to do with a popular peeve: "could care less."  Continue reading...

William Safire passed away over the weekend at the age of 79, and his loss is felt particularly strongly by those who loyally followed his "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine for the past three decades. Safire retired from his Pulitzer Prize-winning political column for the Times in 2005, but he continued to relish his role as "language maven" to the very end. He was not simply a pundit on matters political and linguistic, however: he was also an extremely generous man, both publicly in his philanthropic work with the Dana Foundation and privately with friends and colleagues.  Continue reading...