March is Women's History Month. In homage, we will clear a space on the davenport for all things female in the Language Lounge. English is a particularly apt place to study women's history, because it has fossilized many concepts and attitudes about women that are undergoing reappraisal today. Word associations in English reflect, to a very large degree, a historical rather than a contemporary take on woman; the Visual Thesaurus gives us a place to study these connections.  Continue reading...

Monologue and soliloquy mean about the same thing but you wouldn't know it by looking at the words, and you might not even guess that they had anything to do with speech. It's all because English has always been a compulsive borrower. That's the topic we explore this month in the Language Lounge.  Continue reading...

"Reading the dictionary" sounds like a punishment to most people, or an activity undertaken only by the hopelessly bored or academically inclined. It is, however, an activity that word lovers indulge in unashamedly from time to time.  Continue reading...