Last week on NPR's Morning Edition, sports commentator Frank Deford said in a piece about Serena Williams and her volatile style that "the proof is in the pudding." After a listener questioned the usage, I was called in to be the arbiter on the idiomatic expression. Is the proof in the pudding? Or is the proof of the pudding in the eating?  Continue reading...

Cities that have hard winters have no "alternative" and must repair roads in the summer. And when they do, they need to provide motorists with "alternate" routes.

That sentence illustrates the difference between "alternative" and "alternate."  Continue reading...

Can a simple slangy acronym mark a generation gap? YOLO, short for "You Only Live Once," has emerged as an age-based shibboleth: all too familiar to members of the millennial set, and all but meaningless to their elders. In my latest Boston Globe column, I dissect the YOLO phenomenon, but there's much more to say about those four letters.  Continue reading...

On WBUR's Cognoscenti blog, Jan Freeman (formerly the language columnist for the Boston Globe) writes: "In the 15 years I've been writing about the English language, I've learned a lot, but one question remains as baffling as ever: Why do people love their language peeves so dearly?" To find out her answer, click here.

Let's say you've just arrived from another planet, with a mastery of English, but little exposure to the popular sport known as golf. So you don't understand why one golfer would hit a "banana ball" and end up with a "bogey," while another used a "chicken stick" and ended up with an "eagle."  Continue reading...

We're all familiar with those words that modify nouns. Words like big, yellow, northern, and government. They're called adjectives, and their job is to modify the nouns they're next to.

Government?  Continue reading...