"In difficult times fashion is always outrageous," the Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli famously said. But come hard times or good times, you can always count on fashion writing to be an excessive, outrageous genre unto itself. Where else but in fashion copy would destructed be an acceptable — indeed, comprehensible — adjective? Who but a fashion editor would bully her readers with imperatives such as must-have? And what on earth is one supposed to make of cryptic abbreviations like cardi, bodycon, and MOTG?  Continue reading...

In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, I take on some modern meanings of social and related words like socialize. (Have you been in a meeting where someone has suggested socializing an idea?) We owe much of the recent rise of social-ity to those trendy online terms, social media and social networking. How did we manage to get so social simply by staring into our laptop screens?  Continue reading...

The Associated Press style guide has given its official imprimatur to "The Great Recession" as a description for the global financial crisis that started in late 2007. Many other news organizations, particularly those in Europe, think that the AP is jumping the gun. Kathlyn Clore of the European Journalism Centre reports here.

And now from our friends at Editorial Emergency, a brief rant against abbreviated jargon, from "fail" to "convo": "If you feel like an idiot saying something out loud, don't say it in writing either."  Continue reading...

The recent passage of health care legislation in the U.S. Congress has got linguist Neal Whitman ruminating over a reform-related metaphor that doesn't make much sense when you stop to think about it.  Continue reading...

These childhood memories employ a number of words that appear in my book More Words That Make a Difference, with illustrative sentences from the Atlantic Monthly.  Continue reading...