Any news event brings new terms and phrases to life while reinvigorating old ones. Look how the recent Presidential election spread malarkey, binders full of women, and bayonets across headlines and tweets. Forevermore, those words will jog the memory of anyone who was paying attention to the 2012 election.  Continue reading...

Last year, Season 2 of the popular British TV series "Downton Abbey" yielded a bumper crop of linguistic anachronisms. In Season 3, now airing stateside on PBS, the out-of-place language has continued. There was a particularly glaring anachronism in the most recently aired episode: "steep learning curve."  Continue reading...

My sister has a problem with "passed" and "past." She recently commented thus on a Facebook post about the current flu outbreak: "When I flew this passed week, I wore a mask! I was mortified, but I can't remember the last time I flew and didn't get a cold, and I'm sick of it!" (I really wish I'd seen her in that mask.)  Continue reading...

We're in the middle of awards show season: January saw the People's Choice Awards, the Critics' Choice Movie Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the action continues this month with the Grammy Awards next week, culminating with the Academy Awards. January and February are an extended kudofest for the show business and recording industries. Yes, "kudofest."  Continue reading...

In honor of the Dictionary of American Regional English winning the American Library Association's 2013 award for excellence in reference books, Mark Peters is going back to the beginning of the alphabet to uncover a trove of regional euphemisms.  Continue reading...

If you've been following the strange saga of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o, then you've likely come across the term "catfishing" to describe the type of prank he fell victim to, in which a romantic interest turns out to be nothing more than a fabricated online identity. The term comes from the 2010 documentary "Catfish," but as I describe in my latest Boston Globe column, it's not the first time that a cinematic depiction has spawned a new verb.  Continue reading...