News
- Grammarphobia: Blog | Grammarphobia
- languagehat.com
Q: How can we get everyone to quit using “loose” when they mean “lose”? It’s driving me insane! A: The word “lose” is usually a verb with the sense of [...]
Q: How was the definite article that we now see in the faux-archaic names of ye olde shoppes actually pronounced in Old English and Middle English when it was written [...]
Q: In a NY Times obituary, a historian refers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “arrogant, literate, obdurate, revengeful,” etc. Is it not odd to describe an Islamic scholar as “literate,” [...]
Q: Robert Herrick uses “ye” during most of “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” but switches to “you” at the end. Are both ”ye” and “you” in the [...]
Q: In Jen Beagin’s 2023 novel Big Swiss, Flavia asks Om, her sex therapist, whether “adult” and “adultery” are related. He says they aren’t. Huh? Could that be right? A: Yes. [...]
Q: Having been sucked down many a “rabbit hole” in my reading, I’m wondering how this figurative sense of the phrase developed. Did it appear before Alice in Wonderland was [...]
Q: I am wondering how chimera has come to mean both “an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts” and “an unrealizable dream.” A: When “chimera” originally appeared in ancient Greece as [...]
Q: I was reading an op-ed that had this quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address: “That is cool.” At first I thought it was satire, but he did indeed [...]
Q: Here’s the title of a post on a blog I follow: “More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press.” I’m not aware of this figurative use of [...]
Q: Can euphemisms turn into dysphemisms and vice versa? If yes, why does it happen? A: Yes, euphemisms can turn into dysphemisms, and vice versa. The change from a euphemism [...]
Q: Was it ever normal to rhyme “misery” and “high”? I’m thinking of a couplet (“Make safe the way that leads on high, / And close the path to misery”) [...]
Q: I saw this headline over an NPR article: “VP Vance tries to progress Gaza ceasefire.” Is that a permissible use of “progress”? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it [...]
Q: I say “fetch” when I want my Lab, Gracie, to retrieve something, but “fetching” may refer to her good looks as well as her retrieving. Am I right to [...]
Q: I’ve been hearing the word “hopium” used for an imaginary opiate taken to achieve unrealistic optimism, and “copium” used for one taken to endure hard times. I don’t see [...]
Q: After reading your recent article about Hank Stram’s coining a football sense of “matriculate,” I remembered reading a long way back that Stram also coined “Super Bowl.” A: No, [...]
[Note: In observation of Christmas week, we’re republishing a post that originally appeared on Dec. 23, 2022.] Q: Which is the more traditional version of this Christmas carol: “God Rest [...]
Q: I thought I might further muddy the waters of the wonderful word featured in your post about “dasn’t.” I once saw it defined as a contraction of “darest not,” [...]
Q: I was catching up with The Wire, the TV crime series. In episode one of season five, originally aired in 2008, editors at The Baltimore Sun tell a reporter [...]
Q: I’ve been noticing lately the strange use of “went to go” to form the past tense, as in “went to go see a movie,” “went to go swim,” and [...]
Q: Why did grammatical gender ever develop in the first place, and to what purpose? English lost it centuries ago, apparently to no ill effect. A: Grammatical gender, a system for [...]
My wife and I are reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (see this post), and at one point a character refers to having “a long cool drink of nimbo.” Naturally I [...]
I’ve long been a fan of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (see this 2011 post), and I like Corey Robin’s take on it: In that famous first chapter of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach [...]
I hadn’t been aware of TYPO: The International Journal of Prototypes (at least I’m not aware of having been aware of it…), but I like the cheeky name; their new [...]
I find Jonathan Rée’s LRB review (5 February 2026; archived) of two books on Alexandre Kojève interesting on a number of counts. For one thing, he had the unusual duality [...]
Time for another episode of Ask the Hatters! I was reading Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece “Does A.I. Need a Constitution?” (March 23, 2026; archived) when I found myself flummoxed [...]
Danny Bate featured here just a couple of weeks ago, but he’s got another post I can’t resist sharing: The Armenian Who Learned Greek in Ancient Egypt. This is another [...]
I was led down a rabbit hole today by ktschwarz, who linked to this 2011 Log post, whose long comment thread I read with fascination. I was particularly struck by [...]
Karen Stollznow’s Aeon essay is knowledgeable and well written, but if it were only about the changing semantics of bitch, I probably wouldn’t have linked it, figuring it wouldn’t add [...]
The arXiv paper Extracting books from production language models by Ahmed Ahmed, A. Feder Cooper, Sanmi Koyejo, and Percy Liang is alarming but not in the least surprising. The abstract: [...]
I know this is being discussed everywhere, and I try to avoid bandwagons and the news of the day, but damn if this isn’t too worrying to let slide. Alexandra [...]
From Nippon.com, a spectacular Japanese Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas: From bad manners to taboo, there are certain ways of using chopsticks that are considered as going against dining etiquette. [...]
Dmitry Pruss sent me a link to “Natural selection and language genes in humans” by Rob DeSalle, Guilherme Lepski, Analia Arévalo, et al. (Scientific Reports 16:9382, 17 February 2026; open [...]
Robyn Creswell’s NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus by Eric Calderwood should be worth reading for anyone interested in [...]
I’ve now read my second novel by Gaito Gazdanov, История одного путешествия [The story of a journey], and he’s starting to come a bit more into focus — when you’ve [...]
Sam Dolbear writes at the indispensable Public Domain Review: Go to your local DIY store and the paints will no doubt carry strange names: Tawny Day Lily, Meadow Mist, Candied [...]
I was excited to discover that the Centre for Expanded Poetics has an Archive section that presents the complete runs of Caterpillar (1967-1973), Sulfur (1981-2000), and transition (1927-1938). I don’t [...]
Articles
Youtube Channels
Langfocus – Languages and reaching out into the wider world
JuLingo – Linguist from Latvia
Jackson Crawford – Norse language and myth, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus
Say It In Swedish – Swedish and Swedish culture in a fun and casual way with the Swede, Joakim, from Stockholm
Infographics
