The political terms liberal and libertarian may look similar, but they have very different meanings. Both stem from Latin liber, “free,” but the word liberal entered English hundreds of years before libertarian. This is part of a...
Lester in Dallas wonders why colleagues spell holistic as wholistic when they mean looking at a project as a whole. The standard spelling is holistic; the wholistic variant reflects folk etymology, a reshaping based on the tempting but misleading...
The 2011 words of the year list wouldn’t be complete without occupy, as in the Occupy protests that sprang up in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. And Zuccotti lung? It’s an illness that made its rounds among the camped-out...