In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, I take a look at how the car brand Cadillac remains an emblem of luxury, even though Cadillac itself is no longer really "the Cadillac of cars." In the health care debate on Capitol Hill, we frequently hear high-cost health insurance plans described as "Cadillac plans." And there's another area of American culture where Cadillac continues to have outsized linguistic importance: baseball.  Continue reading...

Do you know what it means to dogfood a product? Have you ever taken part in a bug bash? Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, takes us on a tour of some of the quirky jargon that has sprung up at the software giant.  Continue reading...

In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, I delve into the history of the title Ms. used as a marriage-neutral title for women. As I revealed here on Word Routes back in June, the earliest known proposal for the modern use of Ms. appeared in the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican on November 10, 1901. And as the proposal reemerged over the ensuing decades, two nagging questions kept getting asked: how do you pronounce it, and what does it stand for?  Continue reading...

It really bugs me when I hear someone use the word "individual" when all they mean is "person." It happens a lot with law-enforcement spokespeople. They also tend to say "vehicle" when they could say "car" or "truck."  Continue reading...

Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she illuminates the proper usage of the surprisingly tricky word "regard."  Continue reading...

It was all over the news yesterday: according to a new poll from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, whatever is the word that Americans find most annoying. The poll asked respondents which word or phrase bothered them the most, and whatever easily swamped the competition, with 47 percent naming it the most annoying. You know came in at 25 percent, it is what it is at 11 percent, anyway at 7 percent, and at the end of the day at 2 percent. Despite the widespread media attention, we should ask: does this poll really tell us anything useful?  Continue reading...