The killing of Osama bin Laden by a team of Navy SEALs has brought new attention to the military term kinetic, referring to violent (or lethal) actions in the field of battle. Our resident linguist Neal Whitman takes a look to this addition to the lexicon of war.  Continue reading...

On her Fritinancy blog, Visual Thesaurus contributor Nancy Friedman examines some of the words and phrases that have emerged in the coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden, including Abbottabad, double tap, triumphalism, and halo effect. Read her post here.

Once again award-winning writer and educator Bob Greenman takes us on a journey through words selected from More Words That Make a Difference, a delightful book illustrating word usage with passages from the Atlantic Monthly. Here Bob introduces us to a dextrous slicer of lox and the world of "appetizing."  Continue reading...

It's a rare newscast today, in any language, that does not include coverage of unrest in one or more countries of the Middle East, where people seem to have reached the limit of their patience with and tolerance of repressive, nonrepresentative governments. Nearly all of the countries in upheaval now are Arabic-speaking countries. So how much of this tremendous upheaval do we really "get"?  Continue reading...

Much of the media narrative leading up to today's wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton has focused on Kate's "commoner" background, particularly her mother's family, hailing from the humble coal-mining country of northern England. In class-conscious British society, differences in social background come through in speech patterns -- as anyone who's seen "My Fair Lady" knows. So how have the royal family and the middle-class Middletons navigated this tricky linguistic terrain?  Continue reading...

The prolific British language writer, David Crystal, has produced another winner: A Little Book of Language (now out in paperback), which Publishers Weekly calls "the perfect primer for anyone interested in the subject." In this excerpt, Crystal explains how language changes, from vocabulary to grammar.  Continue reading...