While reading the Aug. 19 Rolling Stone and trying to wrap my brain around Matt Taibbi's latest piece on our country's ongoing financial shenanigans, I stumbled onto an article on Katy Perry, who I know very little about due to my old age.  Continue reading...

In the Language Lounge, we raise a toast to words that are celebrating their golden jubilee, having made their first appearance in print a half century ago, in the heady days of 1960.  Continue reading...

Gen-Xers like me remember MTV as the 24-hour-a-day source of music videos in the 1980s, when it stood for "Music Television." Many people today would be surprised to learn that MTV ever had anything to do with music. These days, MTV is better known as the source of reality shows like "The Jersey Shore." And now, here's something else that has nothing to do with music that you can think of when you think MTV: Conjugating verbs! When you think MTV, think "mood, tense, and voice."  Continue reading...

News recently broke about words like chillax and vuvuzela getting added to the Oxford Dictionary of English. Merrill Perlman, who writes the "Language Corner" column for Columbia Journalism Review, noticed that many reports of the story couldn't get the name of the dictionary right. Here is her guide for the perplexed.  Continue reading...

The Oxford Dictionary of English has announced the addition of more than 2,000 new terms. Meet the turducken ("a roast dish consisting of a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey") and other new entries in the official announcement from Oxford here, and in dictionary editor Catherine Soanes' interview with National Public Radio 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.  Continue reading...