Some gems in this week’s mailbag: Following up on our conversation with a caller hoping to promote less-violent alternatives to the phrase kill two birds with one stone, a listener who grew up in India wrote in with one from her native...
A remark that’s critical of oneself might be described as self-deprecating. Surprisingly, though, before the 1940s, such a remark was properly said to be self-depreciating. In Garner’s Modern English Usage (Bookshop|Amazon), grammarian...
The dated term “jingoism” denotes a kind of belligerent nationalism but the word’s roots lie in an old English drinking-house song that was popular during wartime. Speaking of fightin’ words, the expression “out the side of...