The "Today Show" visited Boston on Friday, and as part of the show they included a segment on the accent of the city, so immediately recognizable and so often imitated (but rarely well!). And who did they turn to for background on how the accent came to be? Our very own Ben Zimmer.  Continue reading...

In advance of Valentine's Day, the dating site Match.com released some survey results indicating that good grammar is something that both men and women on the dating scene use to judge their potential mates. That finding led to a joke on Saturday Night Live that was supposed to illustrate "good grammar" but, ironically enough, failed to.  Continue reading...

Branding expert Nancy Friedman has been seeing a lot of X's and O's lately, "in the breezy, cozy, kissy-huggy names of companies and products." And she says that "Valentine's Day seems the perfect occasion to cuddle up with them."  Continue reading...

"Across America, independent coffee bars have developed private vocabularies to describe the intricate beverages they brew and the idiosyncrasies of those who order them," writes Ben Schott in Sunday's New York Times. Schott presents an "Op-Art" revealing some of this local barista slang, from "crushtomer" to "bro 'spro." Check it out here.

Any news event brings new terms and phrases to life while reinvigorating old ones. Look how the recent Presidential election spread malarkey, binders full of women, and bayonets across headlines and tweets. Forevermore, those words will jog the memory of anyone who was paying attention to the 2012 election.  Continue reading...

Last year, Season 2 of the popular British TV series "Downton Abbey" yielded a bumper crop of linguistic anachronisms. In Season 3, now airing stateside on PBS, the out-of-place language has continued. There was a particularly glaring anachronism in the most recently aired episode: "steep learning curve."  Continue reading...