One of the most powerful words you’ll ever hear — and one of the most poignant — isn’t in dictionaries yet. But it probably will be one day. The word is endling, and it means “the last surviving member of a species.” The...
The new Downton Abbey movie is a luscious treat for fans of the public-television period piece, but how accurate is the script when it comes to the vocabulary of the early 20th century? It may be jarring to hear the word swag, but it was already at...
There’s an English word for “sleep during daytime”: nap. But is there a word for “a period of nighttime wakefulness,” aside from spelling nap backwards as pan? The French have a lovely word for this state, dorveille, a...
One of the most powerful and most poignant words you’ll ever hear isn’t in dictionaries yet, although it probably will be eventually. An endling is the last surviving member of a species. The story of its origin is a marvelous one...
The a historian vs. an historian debate has a pretty straightforward answer: a historian is the correct way to write and say it. “A history” and “a historical” are the best choices, too. This is part of a complete episode.
Careful what you criticize! Not long ago, some words that sound perfectly normal today were considered gauche and grating on the ear. If the complainers had had their way, we couldn’t say a word like pessimism or use contact as a verb! Also...