In this month's Evasive Maneuvers column, our master of euphemisms tackles food and the consequences of food — on earth and in the cosmos.

Recently, aboard the International Space Station, a crisis struck!  Continue reading...

The recent death of Corazon Aquino has stirred memories of her shining moment in 1986, when she became President of the Philippines after a series of protests against the oppressive Marcos regime. The uprising was known both inside and outside of the Philippines as "People Power." The use of an English phrase for such a pivotal moment in national history is a reminder of just how important the English language has been to the Philippines since the advent of U.S. colonialism there more than a century ago. And the Philippines, in turn, has had an impact on English as spoken in other countries.  Continue reading...

In his latest Word Routes column, Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer looked into an anecdote widely reported in the obituaries of Walter Cronkite: that in Sweden (or Holland) news anchors are known as "Cronkiters" (or "Kronkiters"). You can hear Ben talk more about the "Cronkiters" legend on the NPR program "On The Media," airing this weekend. Check your local radio listings for air times, or listen online here.

Impact. Ideate. Interface. Those are just 3 of 30 business buzzwords that you should remove from your vocabulary. See goodcopybadcopy for the whole list.

Have you ever tasted something that was so wonderful that experiencing it for the first time transported you rapturously to another plane, the food itself rising to the level of the divine, the perfect essence of what that food was supposed to be?  Continue reading...

Last week, after the death of Walter Cronkite, I wrote about how two words seemed irrevocably linked to the great newsman: avuncular and anchorman. Obituaries claimed that the term anchorman was first coined to refer to Cronkite, but as I wrote in Slate, this isn't exactly true: there were earlier "anchormen" on television, even if they didn't play quite the same coordinating role as Cronkite and his emulators. The Associated Press obituary, which was picked up by news outlets around the world, followed up the anchorman claim with another linguistic nugget about Cronkite, and this one is on even shakier factual ground.  Continue reading...