When we’re talking about a small book for teaching children to read, or really any short book that introduces a topic, there are two competing pronunciations of the word for that book.
The word "kid" is already informal, and now we have the word "kiddo" living alongside it.
When it comes to media, here's the message: It’s time for a truce between the singular agreement people and the plural agreement people.
Oh goody, it's time to talk about all the goodies!
If you are trying to do good in the world, some would now argue it’s better to be a “good doer” than a “do gooder.”
It is less ambiguous to say “I badly need to shower” than it is to say “I need to shower badly.”
There’s the hair on our heads and the hares in our yards, and there has been some confusion about which one is part of the expression "harebrained."
We can presume things, which may or may not be presumptuous. We can also assume things, which then raises the question of whether things can be "assumptuous."
For those of us of a certain age, if we whack a tennis ball or a softball too hard or at the wrong angle, we could throw our back out of whack.
We sometimes talk about stealing or robbery in terms of "lifting" things, and this is relevant to "heists" as well.
We will never know some of the informal language that was bandied about among speakers in the time of Beowulf.
There are so many interesting bits of language in the world, we can’t help but notice. The question is, when you notice someone saying something interesting, should you point it out?
In a criminal case, you just might need a linguist.
There's competitive forensics, but there's also forensic medicine, forensic accounting, and forensic linguistics too.
The word "deadpan" is on the rise, as multiple parts of speech. That "pan" is related to the historical expression “shut your pan."
Not all of us use the word 'whenever' in exactly the same way, and people are noticing.
It’s 100% true that people online are asking about sentences like, “I got an a hundred on the test.”
The way some people use "resonate" doesn't resonate with all of our listeners.
We can sweep the floor, sweep the board, sweep the stakes, sweep the series – and maybe it will even be called a "clean sweep."
While you may not find “comfortability” in many standard dictionaries yet, it is out there in circulation with “comfortableness.”
Sometimes we’re left in the lurch. It’s probably fair to say that most of us don’t know where that lurch is.
