Our British visitor last month left a copy of the Financial Times in the Lounge. We were reading in it the other day and nearly choked on our soy-milk-softened Postum: "Wine writing in English has, over the past decade, become almost violently pragmatic." First of all, wine writing: you mean it's a genre? Second of all: violently pragmatic? Don't bet the chewy backbone in your delicately vegetal Cabernet Sauvignon on it.  Continue reading...

If you've been wondering what that archway in the north wall of the Language Lounge leads to, now's the time to find out. It's the Language Larder, and this month we're going to hang in there for a while, sampling the lexical delicacies available via the Visual Thesaurus.  Continue reading...

We're dusting off the piano in the Language Lounge this month and exploring the world of musical directions. No matter if your keyboard skills are not up to par: for this interlude the only keyboard you need to use is the QWERTY one connected to your computer, and the Visual Thesaurus.  Continue reading...

Can a word's inner life be revealed by the company it keeps? We set off this month to find out just that, examining April through the prism of the Visual Thesaurus and some other word investigation tools we keep in that big sideboard over against the wall of the Language Lounge.  Continue reading...

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...