Mia in Sumter, South Carolina, wonders: Is there a better term than adult child to describe one of your children who’s now a grownup? It’s hard to come up with a better, one-word expression for one’s adult offspring, and words such as spawn...
Trevor in Austin, Texas, notes that when his young son was talking about drawing a cat, but erasing part of it, the boy used the term deleting rather than erasing. Should he correct his son, or is this a natural evolution of language in the digital...
There’s a small lexical gap left when looking for kinder ways to name former spouses. Kahani of Arcata, California, coined wasband after her 1975 divorce because ex-husband sounded too harsh, as if the person had been struck from a list. The blend...
Grant is pleased as punch about BYU Professor Mark Davies’ new Google Books Corpus, which contains entries for every word ever in the entire Google Books database. In addition to parts of speech and definitions, the site provides contextual examples...
Chester drawers is a common reshaping of chest of drawers, especially when the furniture name has been learned by ear rather than from print. Jessica in Madison, Wisconsin, grew up near St. Louis and thought it might simply be a style name, like...
The British publishers of the Collins dictionary have announced 24 words on their endangered species list. They’re words like “vilipend,” which means “to treat with contempt,” and “nitid,” that’s n-i-t-i-d, which means “glistening. “