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Midwifing Emojis
I ignore a lot of messages on my computer. Life is easier that way. Recently I ignored an update about texting on my phone that had to do with emojis. For years, I’ve been ignoring the little note when...
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Summername
I write this not long after New England’s first frost, when the temperatures have suddenly rebounded into the 70s. Everyone I know calls this Indian summer. Everyone I know loves it. And every year I...
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Professorial Parlance
Like my colleague Ben Yagoda, I was intrigued by Teddy Wayne’s recent New York Times article on modes of speaking, but for a different reason. Toward the end of the article, Wayne observes that, unlike...
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Approaching Partial Zero
When I first heard of a partial zero-emissions vehicle (or PZEV, a fun acronym to say), I wondered if it was a line from a joke. But no. It is a line from a vehicle category designed to circumvent...
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Don’t Cuff Me
Happy start to cuffing season. Yes, folks, it officially begins today. I just learned the term cuffing season four days ago, and already I know I cannot talk about it without showing my age. The...
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‘Micro’ Meditation
For the record, I believe we have a problem on campuses with a persistent, low level, broadly shared, largely unconscious set of prejudices that places an unfair burden on minorities (and, often,...
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Writing in a New Language, Writing Anew
My admiration for the writer Jhumpa Lahiri went up a thousandfold after reading an excerpt from her new book, titled “Teach Yourself Italian,” in this week’s New Yorker. Having been trying to teach...
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Sing We
I grew up singing carols, and I am still singing them, these days in an interfaith chorus that gives an annual holiday concert with audience participation. Returning to the songs of one’s youth is...
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A Skeptic’s Meditation on Doubt
When I used to think about the word skeptic, it was to wonder whether to spell it beginning sk or sc. No longer. Now that AP guidelines have recommended avoiding the term climate-change skeptic, I find...
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The New ‘Politically Correct’ Boondoggle
I suspect there isn’t a reader out there who doesn’t have a story about being on the wrong side of so-called political correctness. Mine goes this way. In graduate school, my well-meaning professor had...
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How We Love Spelling
The illustration at left is from my local walk-in medical clinic, where I finally went after the New Year’s Cold persisted for two weeks. (I’m better now, thanks.) It interests me not only because of...
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The Soul of Wit
I am one of thousands of nontweeters on Twitter, people who signed up for one silly reason or another (mine: my publisher told me to) yet have never found much to tweet about. Trying to work up my...
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How ’Bout That Ass?
So I’m writing my historical novel, minding my own business, when some sort of semantic bug bites me and sends me off on a language tangent. Does this ever happen to you? Last week, I was describing...
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(Your Name), Enabler
It’s hard to tell exactly when the verb enable spawned the noun enabler. An 1825 issue of the Annual Register, per the OED, provides some hint in suggesting that “the word Habilitador might, if there...
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Me, Myself, I, and Yourselves Too
A reader writes, “I received an email just now with the following in it: ‘A technician and myself went to check out the computer in SHM2012.’ I have noticed this a lot (our kids do it) — the...
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Plotting Punctuation
Adam Calhoun’s heat map of punctuation in Huckleberry Finn. Anyone who writes seriously pays attention to punctuation; we know that. That devilish comma in the Second Amendment has spawned countless...
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Nowheresville and Other Birthday Treats
Nineteen fifty-four, the year of my birth,* witnessed Brown v. Board of Education, Elvis Presley’s first successful song, mass testing of the Salk polio vaccine, Hank Aaron’s first major league...
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Sanders in the Ghetto
I first heard the word in an Elvis Presley song, “In the Ghetto,” released not long after the Billy Joe Royal song “Down in the Boondocks.” I remember comparing the lyrics. “And his hunger burns,”...
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Making Categories, Breaking Categories
Not long ago, I attended a conference at Radcliffe on “Ways With Words: Exploring Language and Gender.” The first, and perhaps most salient, thing to note is that this conference was packed. Cis men,...
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Good on Us
Like others in this forum, I try to keep abreast of changes in idiom over time. We notice the emergence of vocal fry, the increasing acceptance of singular they, and so on. But for the most part, our...
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