News
- Grammarphobia: Blog | Grammarphobia
- languagehat.com
Q: “Making the cut” is said to originate from golf, but it might equally be said to have its roots in early moviemaking. Which came first? A: The expression “make [...]
Q: Over the last decade I’ve been seeing an uptick in the use of “drop” to mean something new being released, like a podcast episode or music album. Where does [...]
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 [...]
From the misty depths of my youth I remember the expression parler français comme une vache espagnole (literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’), meaning to speak the language [...]
In flipping through my Russian edition of Vasmer’s Etymological Dictionary, I occasionally run across words that strike me as odd or intriguing in one way or another, and I thought [...]
Martin Haspelmath has been working on a project he’s now put online: The Grammaticon: Linking grammatical comparative concepts to typological databases This blogpost introduces a new resource for general-comparative linguistics: [...]
I’ve long been a fan of Gasan Guseinov (e.g., 2014, 2020), so I’m delighted he’s been showing up again in my RSS feed after a long absence. Today I read [...]
I happened on this translation by Clare Cavanagh and Michał Rusinek of a Miron Białoszewski poem in the NYRB: It’s Easy to Lose Faith A horse and cart went past. [...]
In Jé Wilson’s NYRB review (March 7, 2024; archived) of Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner, there is a description of Comyns’ childhood that begins “She grew up [...]
Songdog was over here today and mentioned a Turkish-American friend whose given name was Ebru; intrigued, I looked it up and discovered that it means ‘ebru (marbled paper, handmade in [...]
Yosef Treller has a very interesting Facebook post (in Russian) that starts: Я – то, что называлось в советское время “книголюб”, 60 лет покупаю, собираю, меняю, а в последние годы [...]
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s Guardian piece is one of those news stories that leave me filled with rage and wanting to smash things: “All you need is a five-minute spot on [...]
I decided to try one of the few Veltman novels I hadn’t yet read, Райна, королевна Болгарская [Raina, princess of Bulgaria] — it didn’t sound too appealing, and in fact [...]
ktschwarz reminds me that the NY Times has rebooted On Language: Written memorably by William Safire for most of its run, the original column was a mainstay of the magazine [...]
David Oks’s essay on citations is not central to my interests, but I know there are lots of Hatters who do science and will probably have things to say; I [...]
I’ve been saying things like “that’s how I roll” for quite a while now, and it occurred to me to wonder about the history of the phrase. As it happens, [...]
Tom Johnson’s LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 6 · 2 April 2026; archived) of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and [...]
Anatoly Vorobey has a Facebook post that starts with a reference to a video in which Oleg Lekmanov compares a bunch of clips of people reading aloud the first stanza [...]
Stephen Fried’s fond reminiscence of Jim Quinn (Philadelphia magazine, 10/19/2020) came out over five years ago, but I just discovered it, and since Quinn is one of my language heroes [...]
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
