Beyond marking direct speech, quotation marks serve a variety of functions. They can signal skepticism, provisional terminology, nonstandard usage, or emphasis when italics aren’t available. There’s no reason to mock hand-lettered signs for their...
A flight attendant from Concord, North Carolina, is irritated by a word she must use often in her work: deplane, meaning “to leave an aircraft.” She knows this verb is effective and efficient, but she says that to her it seems inelegant...
Andrea in San Diego, California, noticed a new restaurant with a name spelled in a curious way. Is there a term for this kind of intentional misspelling used in advertising? Onomastics is the study of naming, and a good source for information about...
How often do you hear the words campaign and political in the same breath? Oddly enough, 19th-century grammarians railed against using campaign to mean “an electoral contest.” Martha and Grant discuss why. And, lost in translation: a...
Why does English derive words for some colors, such as blue and orange, from French, but not words for other colors, such as black and white? A fantastic resource about the history of colors is Kassia St. Clair’s The Secret Lives of Color...
Morgan in San Antonio, Texas, wondered why toasted sounded like a reference to alcohol to some readers of her social media post and marijuana to others. Both readings are possible. Toasted broadly means intoxicated, with context and community...