Search Results

For Shakespeare it was "And let us two devise to bring him thither," but for us it's likely to be "And let's figure out how to get him there." This month in the Lounge we tip our hat to some English adverbs now in their dotage but still available for duty when called upon. Continue reading...

As Major League Baseball heads into the All-Star break, we're taking advantage of the mid-season breather to think about the rich language of baseball. We talked to Paul Dickson, the sport's great lexicographer, about the monumental Dickson Baseball Dictionary. Recently published in its third edition, the dictionary has grown into a thousand-page tome of unprecedented breadth and scope. In the first part of our two-part interview, Dickson explains how his dictionary encompasses the whole history of baseball, from the early days of "protoball" to the latest statistical advances. Continue reading...

When did shall go out of fashion as the first person marker for the future tense? Or was it ever in fashion? This month in the Lounge we look at the career of English's most mismanaged modal. Continue reading...

Stroll through the hipper districts of any American city in 2014 and you may experience the sense of time being slightly out of joint. On shop signs and menus, words that last flourished a couple of centuries ago—or earlier—have been making a comeback. But no word from the distant past is as antique, or as popular in commerce in so many disparate ways, as apothecary. Continue reading...

Earlier this year the Associated Press Stylebook issued one of its frequent updates. "Do not use ride-sharing" to refer to services such as Uber and Lyft, the stylebook counseled; instead, use the modifier ride-booking or ride-hailing. It was the AP's quixotic bid to stem the increasingly common use of sharing to refer to a wide range of activities that are not quite as selfless as the word share may suggest. Continue reading...

Here are the names of three products currently sold in stores and online: Pout Polish, Pout-à-Porter, Pout-o-matic. Here are three business names from around the United States: Kool Smiles, Smileworks, Smile Wide. And here's a question: What do those names tell you about what's being sold and to whom? Continue reading...

This week's publication of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee's long-dormant sequel of sorts to To Kill a Mockingbird, has gotten a tune running through my head: "Go Tell Aunt Rhody." Two titles, same number of syllables, and the same syntactic structure, right down to the use of go plus another verb right next to it. But how do both those verbs fit into the place where just one verb should go? Continue reading...

Pluto is coming into startingly sharp focus, thanks to the first images and data received from the space probe New Horizons last week. As we learn more about this distant cousin of Earth, we're also expanding our linguistic horizons. Here's a closer look at some of the words and names in the Plutonian news. Continue reading...

Alphabet, Google's new parent company, has generated lots of business buzz this week. But the choice of "Alphabet" for the company's name is equally newsworthy. Not only does it signal a departure from Google's blandly descriptive naming style — Google Plus, Google Maps, Google Mail, and so on — but it also takes an imaginative flight away from geek-speak and toward a universe of names inspired by language and literature. Continue reading...