Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the first official performance of the Rolling Stones. When it comes to songwriting, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards usually don't receive as much adulation as their counterparts in the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. But Mick and Keith have churned out some wonderful turns of phrase over the past half century. Consider this, from the Stones' 1969 single, "Honky Tonk Women": "She blew my nose and then she blew my mind."  Continue reading...

If you're hoping to navigate a trans-Atlantic language crossing, you better know the sometimes subtle differences between American and British English. Lynn Murphy, an American expat teaching linguistics in Britain, explains some of the more challenging US/UK distinctions, involving such words as moot, quite, please, and pants. Read her whole list in the Emphasis Write Away e-bulletin here.

Shortly after 10 a.m. EDT on June 28, FOXNews and CNN erroneously reported that the US Supreme Court had invalidated the Affordable Care Act. Simultaneously, Scotusblog, which was live-blogging the last Supreme Court session of the 2011 term, correctly announced that the Court had upheld most of the ACA.  Continue reading...

In the Language Lounge, we look at how language changes incrementally over time in ways that are not obvious to one or two generations of speakers, but become obvious over a span of decades or centuries. Need proof? Just look at the elliptical grammar of English-language headlines, which can stump non-native speakers.  Continue reading...

"The voice of a generation, Dylan's albums hit the airwaves at a time when protest songs could actually influence the national discourse."

I was confronted by this sentence when I sat down to take a copyediting test that would determine whether or not I got a job as an assistant editor on a biographical reference series.  Continue reading...

June 23, 2012 would have been the 100th birthday of the British polymath Alan Turing. Among his achievements, Turing contributed substantially to the field of computers, and his name shows up multiple times in the lexicon of IT. Reflecting on this made me wonder who else I might find represented in the vocabulary of the field. Lots of people, it turns out.  Continue reading...