Some holiday words have more than one meaning, like "trim" the tree. And some meanings have more than one word, like "gift" ...

Decades after I began writing about language, there are still words I avoid out of fear I’ll use them wrong. And worse: Some of these are terms I’ve learned, written about, then promptly forgotten.

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...

With analysts and vendors using "technical debt" and other phrases to mean whatever they want them to mean, someone has to defend the language. IT loves buzzwords. But it is now becoming frightfully ...

Children learn language effortlessly and completely voluntarily. They learn new words miraculously fast. A teenager masters about 60,000 words of their mother tongue by the time they finish high ...