Sometimes a euphemism is staring you in the face, blowing a raspberry, and insulting your mother, but you don't even realize it. That's how I feel about mischief — a word whose history I might be doomed to repeat, since I didn't know diddly about it till recently.  Continue reading...

A Spanish educational ad campaign using what appears to be "bad English" has University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron thinking about the spread of international English beyond the Anglophone world.  Continue reading...

We rarely shine the spotlight on a single word in the Lounge but this month we have a special honoree: the noun patch. We've heard a couple of startling uses of patch recently and it got us thinking about what a great word it is, and how well it exemplifies the genius of language and the genius of English.  Continue reading...

As the massive oil disaster unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico, John Conway of the Cosmic Variance blog wonders what name we will eventually settle on for the environmental catastrophe. The "BP Deepwater Horizon Spill"? The "Transocean/BP Leak"? Read more here.

Say you're reading the "About Us" page on a company's website, and they tell a little story about how they came up with a common word long ago, perhaps as part of an early advertising campaign or in the creation of a consumer product. Should you believe the story? Don't count on it! That's the lesson of my latest On Language column in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, exploring the tricky terrain of corporate etymology — or rather, etymythology.  Continue reading...

A new usage of the word blog is emerging, and not everyone is happy about it. As Grant Barrett writes on the blog of the Copyediting newsletter, for some people blog can now mean "a single, dated, first-person post on a web site" rather than "an entire site of such posts." But according to an informal survey, most copy editors aren't on board with the new meaning.  Continue reading...