Why do newspaper reporters end articles with the number 30 or the three-pound-sign symbol ###? No one knows for sure, although that never stopped journalists from debating the origin of this way of ending a story. The practice arose in a bygone era...
Books that make great gifts for language-lovers, the difference between a nerd and a geek, and talk about a new term, poutrage, and what do you call the crust in the corners of your eyes after a night’s sleep?
In the novel Jane Eyre, characters sometimes speak whole sentences in French. A high school English teacher says her students wonder if there’s a term for inserting whole sentences from another language into fiction. Grant talks about the use...
Text-messaging is destroying our kids’ ability to write, right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Texting and Writing Ability” You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m...
A Pittsburgh woman reports that when she went away to college, she was surprised to find people correcting her grammar when she’d say things like “the car needs washed” or “the kids need picked up.” She wonders if...
Tivoization n.— «The new rules would also restrict something Stallman calls “Tivoization,” a term for devices that are built with free software, but don’t allow users to mess around with all of the code, such as the TiVo…digital...
