Regardless of where your views fall on the political spectrum, there's a pretty good chance that you subscribe to the idea that we are in a new age of inauthenticity. The modern world makes it even more of a challenge to "get real" when we are communicating with language.  Continue reading...

The ubiquitous, and relatively recent, commercial sense of nation veers away from the word's earlier meanings. And it intersects in interesting ways with a related word that's also in the spotlight right now: nationalism.  Continue reading...

Just as there are oodles of food trucks, there are mega-oodles of language emetics in the form of euphemisms. Please hate enjoying or enjoy hating the following.  Continue reading...

Linguistics and Big Data have been a fruitful partnership since they first found each other, and new hookups with promising results are happening all the time. Here's a small sampling of the riches to be found in two new corpora — the TV Corpus and the Movie Corpus.  Continue reading...

Here are some of the euphemisms I've scraped, like barnacles, off the bloated boat of language. Do not attempt such hazardous, horsepucky-adjacent collection yourself.  Continue reading...

It's that time of year when I choose a Euphemism of the Year. I've whittled the list down to four candidates, which are the lexical equivalent of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Continue reading...