“It makes me mad when people say ‘literally’ when they mean ‘figuratively’ as it does sound stupid and confusing,” a poster on Quora wrote recently. “Is this normal?” In the replies, the top answer is ...

Even if you’re not a full-blown grammar nerd, you’ll find the origins of these words that changed meaning over time completely fascinating The English language is alive—and like any living thing, it ...

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how many numbers is a word worth? The question may sound silly, but it happens to be the foundation that underlies large language models, or LLMs — and ...

Years ago I wrote in this space that I don’t recall ever hearing someone use “beg the question” to mean “raise the question.” A blogger stumbled across the column and deemed my assertion highly ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

I have always found words captivating. I’ve always been precise with my words because that is how I convey the meaning of my inner thoughts. Everything in spoken languages is dependent on definitions.