Underbelly

Open Table last week sent me a confirmation of a restaurant reservation.  It included the instruction that we would be cancelled "u...

Well hey--I sort of knew that this had to exist but I didn't trouble until just this weekend to figure out that it actually  exists. ...

It seems that Captain Phillips--the real  Captain Phillips, non-Tom-Hanks version--and I share two noteworthy life facts .  One, we both wa...

The Phoenicians invented the alphabet and the Greeks added vowels. But where and when did the vowels come in? Robin Lane Fox makes a case...

It's the Heisenberg principle that holds (not so?) that the closer you look at something, the less likely it is to be there.   I guess ...

The estimable Michael Quinion puzzles over "behoove/behove" as in "it ill behoves": It’s one of those few expression...

It's surely* a truism that you can gauge social changes by changes in language usage.  Here are a couple of instances that caught my ey...

..or its companion, "C-level."  Never  heard them before, ran across them twice in 24 hours.  A friend runs a fleet of continuing...

Per the expert , there is no difference in meaning between "while" and "whilst."

We're planning for  trip to Spain later this spring.  I don't know any Spanish, but I know a dribble of French and Italian (as if!-...

Chatting with a Latin American student this morning, I remarked on how Argentines seem to me to speak their Spanish with an Italian flouris...

In his excellent weekly newsletter on language , Michael Quinion showcases "froward:"   ...means leading away. ... By the fourte...

Michael Quinion has an entertaining item up about the phrase (as I remember it) "if the Lord is willin' and the Creek don't ri...

Reading Galileo in Rome   by Mariano Artigas and William R. Shea, I discover a curious array of verbal curiosities.  One is the story of a ...

Der Spiegel  tells us that Viktor Orbán is demonstrating that he really meant it when he laid out his populist-nationalist agenda for Hung...

I see that Stanley Fish has inaugurated and concluded his contest (over at Slate , link , link ) to select great sentences from the English...

When you find a frozen lemon, make frozen lemonade: my nomination for linguist of the week goes to Grigoriy Zilbergleyz , 64, who spent Sund...

  Vanessa  Jackson, the Texas diva judge, offers a provocative insight into the forecasting of criminal behavior: [S]he noticed that a larg...

"Horde" as in "Mongol Horde," means the central headquarters, the general's encampment. Well, actually that I knew...

From a blog commentator at the NYT via Michael Quinion : Bed bugs is TWO words - not one. The general rule for writing out common names ...