"Chicago stretches along the shore of Lake Michigan, which makes a beautiful shore drive possible." This sentence has a problem with pronoun-antecedent agreement: which is vague; its antecedent (the noun the pronoun stands for) is unclear. Today, we'll review some basics of pronoun-antecedent agreement and find out why agreement is so important.  Continue reading...

With the final Harry Potter movie opening this weekend, many are reflecting on the last legacy of J.K. Rowling's oeuvre. In print and on screen, the Harry Potter franchise has been incredibly successful, and it's only natural that such a mass phenomenon would leave its imprint on popular culture, including the popular lexicon. Rowling's inventive use of language has been a key to conjuring the fantasy world of the Potterverse, and that language has seeped into real-world usage as well.  Continue reading...

Long before last week's verdict in the Casey Anthony trial, viewers of Nancy Grace's Headline News program had gotten used to her referring to Anthony, accused of murdering her daughter Cayley, as the tot mom. People hearing tot mom for the first time sometimes ask if it's connected to another parenting-related compound word that has gained prominence in recent years: baby mama.  Continue reading...

Words have meaning, right? Sure they do, we all know that! We certainly use words, spoken or written, at all hours of the day and night to convey what we mean to other people. We know the meanings of many words, and if we don't know what a word means -- heterolysis, for instance -- we can look up its meaning in the dictionary: "the destruction of cells of one species by enzymes derived from cells of a different species."  Continue reading...

At England's Ledbury Poetry Festival, poets were asked to single out "the expressions that have become such cliches that they have lost all meaning." Their responses range from "think outside the box" to "I am a very spiritual person." Read the cliches they selected, with commentary, at The Guardian here.

The 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible does not pass without notice in the English-speaking world. David Crystal's book on the subject has received widespread media attention. The particular ways in which the famous translation has influenced the course of English are fascinating and well-documented by Crystal and others; this month, we'll look at some of the other features that give the KJV its enduring appeal.  Continue reading...