Maria C. of Jersey City, NJ writes in with today's Mailbag Friday question: "My coworker always uses the word reticent when he really means reluctant. Isn't he using the wrong word?"  Continue reading...

Bob Greenman, an award-winning writer, educator, and speaker, has written two outstanding guides to vocabulary enrichment: Words That Make a Difference and More Words That Make a Difference, with illustrative passages from the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, respectively. We asked Bob to pick some choice words from the second volume (co-authored with his wife, Carol), and he came up with a trio of words exposing the seamy underbelly of Old Hollywood.  Continue reading...

Yesterday, writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker offered a delightful lesson on the perils of learning grammar from rock and roll lyrics. Among the grammatical malefactors are Bob Dylan, whose song "Lay, Lady, Lay" uses the verb lay in an intransitive fashion instead of lie. Likewise, Dylan sang "If not for you, babe, I'd lay awake all night," and "I wanna lay right down and die." But he should get points for using lay in the transitive too, as in: "Lay down your weary tune," or using lay as the proper past-tense form of lie: "I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay." Still, if the foremost bard of American popular music can't be consistent on this point, what hope is there for the rest of us?  Continue reading...

As the recession worsens, we're all learning far more than we ever wanted to know about the ins and outs of the banking industry, ground zero of the financial meltdown. And we're learning new lingo too: the news these days brings word of good banks, bad banks, zombie banks, and even banksters.  Continue reading...

Last month a usage dispute broke out in the comments section here on the Visual Thesaurus. Our "Evasive Maneuvers" columnist Mark Peters described a friend who "started feeling nauseous." Two commenters objected to this use of nauseous, saying that the word properly describes someone or something that is sickening, and that the word Mark should have used is nauseated. Who's right?  Continue reading...

As the only euphemism columnist in America, it is my sacred duty to help euphemisms swim and purr to their greatest potential, lest Darwinian forces maul them prematurely.  Continue reading...