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Chewing Some Olde Fat
I write during the summers at a house overlooking Excalibur Lake, just off Sir Walter Court and Lady of the Lake Circle. We pick up our milk at the Sherwood Shoppe. You get the idea. So it felt apropos...
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Say It Ain’t So, Joe
Vice President Biden, choosing the vernacular In which I cogitate on the ways in which racial language enters the 2012 presidential campaigns through a side door and note the prevailing color patterns...
View ArticleEmpire of Signs
Travel is a chance to read. I don’ t have in mind the novel you’ve been saving, much less the stack of papers you foolishly thought you’d get to on that family vacation. I’m thinking of something much...
View ArticleWith a Nasal Drawl
What do Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, Neil Diamond, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Joseph Mascis Jr. have in common? A nasal drawl. Or so they say. From a Boy’s Life of Mark Twain: By and by there was another...
View ArticleFreeway, Come Home!
One of the least successful movies of 2012 is Darling Companion, featuring high-caliber actors and a pedestrian script centered around a dog. The dog is found, and then lost, and then found again. You...
View ArticleEye-rate About Eye-ran
Three years ago, I wrote a short essay for NPR’s Web site about the pronunciation of Iraq. Each of the two syllables offers choices. The second can rhyme with track or flock. The first can have a long...
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Malarkey, or the New Loose Talk
Ah, the wearin’ of the green. I lay claim to one-quarter Irish blood, which yields the in-group privilege of getting my Irish up when I want to and also provokes delight in Joe Biden’s recent use of...
View ArticleGrammatical Relationship Counseling Needed
When you find yourself fighting the same battle over and over again, and it’s about something of no real importance, and you’re battling someone you really shouldn’t be at war with, and you never win,...
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Hey, ‘Lady’! An Exchange
For a while, “lady” and “ladies” were a no-no. But they have shot back into prominence. Another exchange with my 22-year-old daughter Maria. Maria Yagoda: Just about a year ago, a friend (female,...
View ArticleI Guess ‘It’s a Thing’
A couple of weeks back, NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a piece about the word random. It definitely was something I would be expected to like. After all, I am the NPR guy di tutti NPR guys. All the...
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Peeking Under the Lid
My one serious attempt at memoir takes the reader back, as memoirs often do, to my adolescence and coming of age, in the late 60s and early 70s. When the manuscript went through copy-editing, a long...
View ArticleComing to the Internet: the ‘Dictionary of American Regional English’
One of the greatest lexicographic enterprises of the 20th century has now reached its goal, with publication of the sixth and final volume by Harvard University Press. It’s the Dictionary of American...
View ArticleHow We Speak
American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, is unique, in the old sense of “one of a kind.” It is the one and only academic journal that focuses on what’s happening with the English...
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Words: a Time Capsule
People love words. We may not use them adroitly, spell them correctly, or like those who possess larger word-hoards than we, but The New York Times minifeature “That Should Be a Word” draws thousand of...
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Rockin’ Robin
My mother talked to the birds. She’d stand under the Jonathan apple tree in our Missouri back yard and whistle up a cardinal or a yellow warbler or a black-capped chickadee, just by changing the melody...
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The Cliché Expert Gets Fired Up Over March Madness
Mike Krzyzewski, coach at Duke, whose team generates more than a few well-worn descriptives (In his heyday, Mr. Arbuthnot, the Cliché Expert, regularly graced the pages of The New Yorker, offering his...
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DARE Up in the Air
The DARE map (top), with state codes, compared with a geographic map. DARE’s map is based on population density as of the 1960s. It shows responses DARE collected during fieldwork in 1965-70. Where...
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What Does ‘What Does That Even Mean?’ Even Mean?
Pullum’s e-mail read, “Most things, yes. It’s a bit of a problem. I have often written pieces that then had to be just tossed in the electronic trash because he published a longer and better...
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Graduating Teachers, Teaching Graduates
As we approach the annual rites, the degree of dudgeon rises again. Obama may say it; Barbara Walters may say it; our beloved children, on whom we have showered more than half our income annually over...
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The Comic Stylings of POTUS
Obama at the Correspondents’ Dinner: “But I kid Mitch McConnell. … “ At 10:14 PM on April 27, Barack Obama took the podium at the Washington Hilton to the tune of “All I do Is Win,” by DJ Khaled....
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