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  1. Word Count

     Balzac's "Lost Illusions": a Novel in Contrasts
    Tue May 14 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    No other novel is more worldly than Honoré de Balzac's Lost Illusions, delighting us with courtesans and countesses, misers and millionaires. Yet no other novel is more word-y, more focused on the art and business of writing.

  2. Blog Excerpts

     Silicon Valley's Favorite Word: "Delight"
    Tue May 14 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Los Angeles Times tech reporter Chris O'Brien has discovered that the favorite word among techie types is "delight": "A squishy, subjective, hard-to-pin-down term. So daringly unquantifiable, so proudly immeasurable. And now, suddenly, all the rage in data-driven Silicon Valley." Read O'Brien's delightful piece here.

  3. Word Count

     How to Overcome Your Writing Shame
    Mon May 13 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    When I was 10 years old, one summer morning I remember standing at my kitchen door, talking to a neighborhood pal of mine. Suddenly, wasps started swarming around us. Terrified (I'd been stung on the lip on the first day of grade 1 — an extraordinarily painful experience), I slammed the door and ran to get my mother. It never even occurred to me to try to rescue my friend.

  4. Blog Excerpts

     Getting "Gatsby": The Language Behind the Novel
    Fri May 10 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    With Baz Luhrmann's movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby arriving in theaters, this week has been full of Gatsby talk. Online commentators have been writing about words coined or popularized by Fitzgerald, the slang of the 1920s "flapper" era, and even the name Gatsby itself.

  5. Word Count

     Writing Tics: The Optics of Metrics
    Thu May 09 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    The mayor's op-ed piece urged action on a regional 911 system, which, among other things, would "provide consistent and transparent performance metrics countywide." Alas, the program has not been put into effect, "as a result of the political optics." Jargon and more jargon.

  6. Word Count

     What's in a -Nym?
    Wed May 08 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    There are all sorts of words in English based on the -onym word part, which derives from a Greek word that means name. Everyone knows about homonyms and synonyms, but what about retronyms, demonyms, and aptonyms?

  7. Blog Excerpts

     Flash, Gleam, Glint, Sparkle: McPhee, Woolf, and Words
    Tue May 07 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    In an essay on writing in last week's The New Yorker, John McPhee describes drawing boxes around "perfectly O.K." words in a search for the "mot juste." Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf tells us words are a messy tangle that will always elude our best efforts to tie them down.

  8. Word Count

     Orwell and Singular "They"
    Mon May 06 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    We'd like to welcome Jonathon Owen, a copy editor and book designer with a master's degree in linguistics, as our newest regular contributor! Here Jonathon explains how he discovered that an oft-quoted example of George Orwell using singular "they" turned out not to be by Orwell after all.

  9. Word Routes

     How "Baloney" Got Phony
    Fri May 03 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    An Inside Higher Ed article recently quoted Duke University physics professor Steffen Bass as describing the foolish stance of some of his colleagues as "bologna." Prof. Bass surely said baloney, a spelling that represents an Americanized pronunciation of bologna sausage, and it also came to mean "nonsense" in the 1920s.

  10. Evasive Maneuvers

     Gentleman Turkeys and Other High-Class Gobbledygook
    Thu May 02 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    Do gentlemen exist anymore? The word feels old-fashioned and paleolithic in the era of dudes, bros, and creeps. However, the word gentleman has a long, vibrant history as a euphemism. That history is worth celebrating. In the spirit of a recent column on angels, here's a look at the critters and crimes gentleman has coddled and concealed.
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