Ever wonder how the food terms macaroon, macaron and macaroni are related? It turns out that all three are "rooted in the great meetings of the Islamic and Christian culinary traditions in the Middle Ages." Read all about it on The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky's wonderfully nuanced blog, here.

Lisa McLendon, a copy editor for The Wichita Eagle who maintains the Grammar Monkeys blog, recently fielded a complaint from a reader about how the newspaper had used the verb "rise" in a headline. This led her down the path of documenting "nutty non-rules of grammar" that people often hold on to, despite appeals to common sense.  Continue reading...

John Pollack makes a case for the cultural significance of the lowly pun in his new book, The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics. Pollack, a former presidential speechwriter, was also the winner of the 1995 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, in Austin, Texas. In this excerpt, Pollack describes the first round of the competition.  Continue reading...

It's not every day that an obscure word like consubstantial becomes a topic of hot debate. But this week The New York Times reported that a new English translation of the liturgy used for the Roman Catholic Mass is prompting complaints about the difficulty of the revised language, and consubstantial is Exhibit Number One for the critics.  Continue reading...

Recently on Slate, University of Delaware English professor Ben Yagoda tackled "the 'nonplussed' problem": How long should we cling to a word's original meaning? (Nonplussed, for instance, has changed its meaning for many people from "perplexed" to "unfazed.")  Continue reading...

In the past few months, Americans have probably heard more about collective bargaining than in the past few decades. I've heard and read the term collective bargaining so much recently that it has gotten me thinking about the strange nature of English gerunds.  Continue reading...