Linguistics

Q: I have noticed the absence of the subjunctive in lines from recent shows and movies. Have you? A: The English subjunctive has been gradually disappearing since Anglo-Saxon days, with [...]

Q: I would love to see a story on “performative gratitude,” a term for expressing gratefulness when you don’t really mean it. The usage seems to be flooding society. A: [...]

Q: I was discussing well-being this morning and wondered about its antonym. AI says “the opposite of wellbeing is often considered to be illbeing, which refers to a state of poor [...]

‘Q: I am used to reading older texts that use “my” before consonants (“my love”) and “mine” before vowels (“mine eyes”). But once in a while I see them used [...]

Q: I recently encountered a sentence about the need for “state and local leadership on immigration.” This use of “on” strikes me as lazy and inconsiderate of syntax. It’s probably [...]

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: 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: 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: 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: 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 [...]

I just learned an interesting bit of word history via Merriam-Webster’s delightfully discursive entry for caprice: Etymology borrowed from French, going back to Middle French, borrowed from Italian capriccio “whim, [...]

I’ve complained about bad reviews more than once, so it’s only fair that I give credit to a good one — namely, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s NYRB review (March 21, 2024; archived) [...]

I’ve been alerted to The Speakers of Indo-European and Their World (ed. Sergio Neri and Michiel de Vaan; open access) twice today — by David Marjanović in this comment and [...]

Reading Ian Buruma’s New Yorker review/essay (archived) on the history of ideas of European integration, I was struck by a couple of names that turned out to have interesting backgrounds. [...]

Our Germany-dwelling Texas-bred friend Stuart Clayton alerted me to the existence of québecois faque, “eye dialect spelling of fait que,” which means “So, therefore, in that case.” Stu sez “Here’s [...]

I have been alerted by a reader to an odd etymology: the word aspic, in the words of the OED “A savoury jelly made with meat stock; a cold dish [...]

My local classical station played a piece featuring the once famous harpsichordist Igor Kipnis; my first thought, on hearing the ID, was “He died quite a while back — I [...]

As regular readers will know, I am a sucker for old-fashioned printing — one of the best parts of my job as a proofreader in a printing and design department [...]

RNZ reports on yet another distressing development due to the “AI” craze: When a Wellington second-hand bookstore started to get bulk book orders, owner Anne-Marie Thorby smelt a rat. A [...]

I greatly enjoyed Michael Ledger-Lomas’s LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie [...]