The woman suffrage movement introduced Americans to a new vocabulary of voting rights. Here's a centennial look back at our linguistic debt to the 19th Amendment and its advocates.  Continue reading...

Linguistically, it seems, the second decade of the 21st century was all about our selves. At its annual meeting the American Dialect Society selected (my) pronouns as its word of the year for 2019 and singular or nonbinary they as the word of the decade.  Continue reading...

Here's a look at the OED's latest quarterly update to see if there are any euphemisms. If not, I'll suggest how some of the terms could be euphemisms. After all, this column is an offering to the Malarkey Gods.  Continue reading...

October marks the centenary of the Volstead Act, the enabler of Prohibition. This occasion licenses the Language Lounge to pop the corks a bit early and look at the linguistic legacy of the Prohibition era.  Continue reading...

Metaphors about space come at us so thick and fast in talking about the digital world that we don't even notice that they are there, and that's probably a good thing: it helps us to make sense of complicated phenomena.  Continue reading...

Do you find 21st-century life shallow and superficial? Take another look: In fact, ours is an era of extraordinary depth — linguistically speaking, anyway. As the 2011 song by Adele put it, we're rolling in the deep.  Continue reading...