Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one...
Why is boxing called the sweet science when it’s obviously such a bruising sport? Also, a mother of five is baffled when her Gen Z kids use words she thought she knew. For example, they call sweatshirts sweaters, and declare that’s so aesthetic...
When an international team of scientists traveled to a research station in Antarctica for six months, the language they all shared was English. After six months together, their accents changed ever so slightly — a miniature version of how language...
Nikki in Northampton, Massachusetts, disagrees with her teenage daughter about the word beef, as in to have a beef, meaning “to have a problem with someone or something.” Nikki uses the word a before the word beef, but her daughter omits that...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work humans...