Starting this year, Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants not only have to spell words correctly. A controversial new rule means they’ll have to answer vocabulary questions, too. Also, when it comes to reading text, do you prefer “paper” or...
Has the age of email led to an outbreak of exclamation marks? Do women use them more than men? Also, is there a word for the odd feeling when you listen to a radio personality for years, then discover that they look nothing like your mental picture...
A 2009 article in American Speech by John Considine proposes that blotto, slang for drunk since around World War I, may come from Blotto Frères, a French maker of a three-wheeled delivery vehicle known to be dangerous and erratic. The idea is that...
A recent article in The New Yorker magazine about the late writer David Foster Wallace has Martha musing about Wallace’s stem-winding sentences, and the word stem-winder.