Grant’s 7-year-old son has gotten into Ancient Greek, of all things. While it’s a joy to teach your kids interesting things, a child’s eagerness to learn also poses a challenge for parents. You don’t want to squelch their...
For language lovers, it’s like New Year’s, Fourth of July, and the Super Bowl all rolled into one: The brand-new online edition of the Dictionary of American Regional English. Martha and Grant explain what all the fuss is about. Plus...
Vape, meaning “to smoke an electronic cigarette,” is among the entries in Grant’s tenth annual Words of the Year List for The New York Times. This is part of a complete episode.
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...
Grant offers examples from his latest words of the year list, including Crankshaft (the code name for the Osama Bin Laden), and basketbrawl, referring to the fight that broke out between the Georgetown Hoyas and the Chinese National Team. This is...
A college senior has invented a word to describe that anxiety we feel when there’s unfinished work looming over us. He calls it desgundes. As in, “that twenty-year-old in the library making a three-foot boondoggle must likely be dealing...