The relations among words are not so different from those among people. It's not unusual for, say, first cousins to bear no obvious resemblance to each other, but if we examine their DNA we find that they have a grandparent in common.  Continue reading...

Is Dreyer's English "utterly correct"? Of course not, as the author would be the first to acknowledge. But it's compulsively readable, thoroughly helpful, and delightfully funny. For anyone who cares about writing well, it's an utterly essential addition to your shelf of most-reached-for reference books.  Continue reading...

Just as there are oodles of food trucks, there are mega-oodles of language emetics in the form of euphemisms. Please hate enjoying or enjoy hating the following.  Continue reading...

Linguistics and Big Data have been a fruitful partnership since they first found each other, and new hookups with promising results are happening all the time. Here's a small sampling of the riches to be found in two new corpora — the TV Corpus and the Movie Corpus.  Continue reading...

Here are some of the euphemisms I've scraped, like barnacles, off the bloated boat of language. Do not attempt such hazardous, horsepucky-adjacent collection yourself.  Continue reading...

What happened (and is apparently still happening) in English-speaking societies that results in so much discourse about the problems in education? Here is some fodder for the discussion.  Continue reading...