All Verbal Energy
- What it means when things 'go viral' on the Web
How did we end up with a disease metaphor to refer to the way information travels through society?
- Life at C-level: too many chiefs?
The Monitor’s language columnist looks at the proliferation of 'C-level' job titles.
- The unbearable smartness of being
The Monitor's language columnist feels the lexical ground shifting on just what 'smartly' means.
- Janus words in the language of dreams
Words with mutually contradictory meanings indicate how our minds cope with complexity.
- Walking back, to avoid climbing down
A pedestrian metaphor proves to have legs in this electoral season
- Sit tight, drive safe, and watch for flat adverbs
An article on women in the CIA offers, in passing, a grammar lesson.
- Flying to center field with the boys of autumn
A newspaper account of a 14-inning ball game makes a point about irregular verbs.
- Earworms and the 'mononymous' phenomenon
Doing a spell-check on a pop singer's name, the Monitor's language columnist is reminded how writers can get words, as well as music, 'stuck' in their ears.
- He perhaps didn't build that sentence very well
A grammar geek has to love it when 'syntax' makes headlines.
Something we should stop having doneA news story from London's National Gallery illustrates the trouble with something people say every day.
'I'm finna start training so hard …'A new form of a familiar idiom shows how an Olympian went for the gold.
- Modulating our opposition to new prepositions
A 'new' preposition, borrowed from the world of math, is a reminder of how closely language allies with logic.
- Letters that simply intrude into our words
The Monitor’s language columnist looks at the way some words gain sounds and others lose them to make them easier to pronounce.
- Moving toward the correct answer on this one
Looking to settle the toward vs. towards question, the Monitor’s language columnist discovers the excrescent “t.”
- A tobacco moment, a fiscal cliff, and a Grexit
It's great to have such memorable shorthand phrases for the complex financial problems we're going through; but a few years from now, will we even remember what they meant?
- The double life of commas
The use of commas, unlike that of other marks of punctuation, is governed by both rules and conventions.
- How makers make their mark without meetings
A familiar old word picks up a distinctive new use to describe those who actually create new stuff in the economy.
- Is your vocabulary in shape for the Olympics?
It turns out that the biggest sport at this summer's Games is something called 'athletics.'
- Defining the perimeter of our parameters
The Monitor’s language columnist is forced to come to grips with two words related to measurement.
- A little column about something big
An appreciation of a hardworking word that does a lot of heavy lifting.
