Don’t move my cheese! It’s a phrase middle managers use to talk about adapting to change in the workplace. Plus, the origin story of the name William, and why it’s Guillermo in Spanish. And a five-year-old poses a question that...
Malamute, kayak, and parka are just some of the words that have found their way into English from the language of indigenous people in northern climes. β’ In the 1970s, some scientists argued that two quarks should be called truth and beauty. β’ The...
Marta, who studies English in Kyiv, Ukraine, says she was reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (Bookshop|Amazon) when she encountered the word parasol, noting its similarity to a Ukrainian word for “umbrella,” ΠΏΠ°ΡΠ°ΡΠΎΠ»Ρ. Both...
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...
Quinn from Excelsior, Minnesota, is five years old β well, five and three-quarters, as she points out. She wonders why the letter Q is so often followed by U. In Old English, the alphabet didn’t include the letter Q. The word quick, for...
When writing textbooks about slavery, which words best reflect its cold, hard reality? Some historians are dropping the word slave in favor of terms like enslaved person and captive, arguing that these terms are more accurate. And raising a...