The noun wokeness now appears in the Cambridge Dictionary, where it is defined as "a state of being aware, especially of social problems...

Today we will look at – be still, my beating heart – the history of punctuation. Yes, punctuation has a history, and yes, it is more...

Confession: I sometimes play Scrabble with myself. Okay, quite often. There, I said it. When she and I (our preferred pronouns) play, our...

Readers under the age of fifty may want to skip this blog post. You may not (yet) be suffering from diminounation, a word I just invented...

Some nursery rhymes stick with us from generation to generation and from century to century. The ones that stick usually have simple,...

Among my readers and subscribers (who, I blush to tell you, now number in the double digits, and the first digit is no longer one!) are...

No, not the spiritual kind. We are in favor of that mode of immortality, but since we cannot really know anything about it, it isn't blog...

We have talked in this blog about how language changes, how new words are introduced from the surrounding culture, and how language and...

I am amazed and thrilled that there are still so many new words to learn. Some of them actually are new words – recently coined to name a...

Before we get down to business in this blog post, where does the phrase "famous last words" come from, anyway? Nobody knows who actually...

Well, this is a fine kettle of fish, isn't it? Or if we were British (which I, as a Canadian, confusingly sort of partly am) a pretty...

Hello, dear blog readers, single digit though you may now be due to my long absence. Some of you, disgusted by my inconstancy, may have...

This blog is about the quirks of the English language, about writing and writers, about punctuation, grammar, where words come from and...

We have touched on the topic of this blog post before – that language is not static; it is a living human enterprise, it changes and...

I got to thinking about insults recently after reading a novel (Nine Perfect Strangers, by Lianne Moriarty) in which a teen-aged brother...

Once again inspired by something sent by a friend and blog subscriber, I would like today to address the whole sorry business of nyms....

No, this is not a post about alliteration. Stop that. This post is about the limerick as a verse form. A few weeks ago a friend and...

My husband and I were sitting at the dinner table a few days ago, he chewing discontentedly on the vegan meat I had served him. We were...

A friend and blog subscriber recently sent me the following quote by the late writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson: "No two persons...

A modest soul, the pronoun. Not like the endlessly descriptive adjective. Not like the world-defining noun. Not like the decorative and...