Summer has officially begun, which means that for most of us in the northern hemisphere, temperatures are on their way up. Sure, we could write about how hot, or steamy, or roasting it is, or about how you could fry an egg on the sidewalk (please don’t), but English gives us a lot of other great, … [Read more...]
Walmart, Illegal Drugs, and the Associated Press
Print editions of the 2017 AP Stylebook — now in more pleasing shades of blue — hit store shelves last week. As usual, changes from one year to the next are many and often subtle. In an email sent on May 31, the Associated Press editors highlighted a few new and updated entries. The following go … [Read more...]
Going Agog for -agogue
The suffix -agogue isn’t much used in the English language, but it does give us a handful of very useful words to describe a building, three people, and some chemicals to help your bodily fluids along. It stems from the Greek agein “to lead.” A Note on Pronunciation: In the noun forms ending with … [Read more...]
The Language of Rejection
The daily news is so chock full of arguments, accusations, and harsh criticisms nowadays that I am wary of reading it. Sometimes the ire is backed up with well-reasoned arguments and loads of data, and other times it’s fueled by frustration, rage, or a firm faith in a factitious "way things are … [Read more...]
Fictions and Factions
Do you know the difference between a fictitious statement, a factitious statement, and a factious statement? These are just three of a cluster of seven adjectives with overlapping definitions that help us separate fact from fiction from faction. Just the Facts Factional is the adjective form of … [Read more...]
What Is Inheritable, and What Heritable?
The quirks of the English language are what make it both fun and difficult. One of those great quirks is the pairs of words that look like they should be opposites but that are actually synonymous, or nearly so, such as flammable and inflammable, press and depress, and ravel and unravel. Heritable … [Read more...]
6 “Maths” for Word People
We copyeditors like to joke (and sometimes it's not a joke) that, being word people and not number people, we aren't good at math. By math, of course, we mean mathematics. But the math in mathematics comes from the Greek manthanein, referring not just to number-crunching but learning in general. … [Read more...]
Credible, Credulous, and Confusable
There's a lot of worry about credibility these days. While some statements are so incredible that only the most credulous will believe them, other people are so incredulous that they trust nothing but what they see with their own eyes, regardless of how credible the source is. Which means that … [Read more...]