Ben Zimmer
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Jacquelyn Martin / AP Trump’s ‘Down Payment’ Trick
The president’s use of the term draws on a long tradition—a way for commanders in chief to connect with people via kitchen-table economics.
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Steven Senne / AP Elizabeth Warren and the Down-to-Earth Trap
Even when she taps into the colloquial vernacular that’s characteristic of her Oklahoma roots, the Democratic presidential candidate risks appearing inauthentic.
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Erin Schaff / Reuters Why Kirstjen Nielsen Sounds Like the Hulk
Her much-ridiculed statement that “we need wall” is a sign that the barrier may be more nebulous than imagined.
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Carlos Barria / Reuters Donald Trump and the Art of the ‘Con’
The president keeps inveighing against all the con jobs he imagines surrounding him. You could say that it takes one to know one.
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Getty / Thanh Do / The Atlantic Aretha Franklin Finally Gets Credit for the Term She Popularized
Not only did the Queen of Soul change the course of music with her smash hit “Respect,” she also introduced a now-ubiquitous slang word into the American lexicon.
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Justin Lambert / Getty That Meme You’re Sharing Is Probably Bogus
Why linguistic urban legends go viral online
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Leah Mills / Reuters Why Do Supreme Court Nominees Have ‘Sherpas’?
The term is a case study in how words from Asian languages work their way into English, often with an exoticizing air that masks more complex cultural histories.
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Mike Lawrie / Getty How Computers Parse the Ambiguity of Everyday Language
Words with multiple meanings pose a special challenge to algorithms.
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Jonathan Ernst / Reuters A Restaurant ‘Eighty-Sixed’ Sarah Huckabee Sanders. What Does That Mean?
Many have claimed to know the origin story of the service industry’s most infamous number. But the real roots of the term have been largely forgotten.
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Jim Cooper / AP The Lexicon of Tom Wolfe
Remembering the writer’s contributions to the English language, which went far beyond the most obvious catchphrases that he popularized
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Sam Rega / Breaking the Bee The Infectious Enthusiasm of Breaking the Bee
An absorbing documentary spotlights four young Indian American spellers trying to make their way through a competitive field.
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Steve Helber / AP ‘Chinaperson’ and the Sanitization of a Racial Slur
A Republican Senate candidate in West Virginia recently put a 21st century spin on the vintage epithet.
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Seth Wenig / AP ‘Wop’ Doesn’t Mean What Andrew Cuomo Thinks It Means
The New York governor recently repeated a common, but dubious, explanation for the epithet.
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Susan Walsh / AP 'Slime Ball' Is Trump's Ooziest Insult
In a tweet targeting former FBI Director James Comey, the president used an epithet whose origins date back 1,000 years.
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Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP How Home-State Pronunciations Can Shape Elections
As an expression of “in-group” identity in American politics, how politicians say a state’s name can be powerfully symbolic.
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Alex Brandon / AP The Origins of the 'Globalist' Slur
President Trump recently used the epithet to describe his outgoing National Economic Council director—but the seeds of its disparaging use were firmly planted 75 years ago.
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Shannon Stapleton / Reuters A Linguistic Guide to Donald Trump's Scatological Insults
Shithole, shithouse. Tomato, tomato.
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Rebecca L. Fall / Twitter / Zak Bickel … Great Moments in 'Shithole' Literature
A 1629 manuscript containing the first-known use of the term can be found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
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Yuri Gripas / Reuters Why Would the President of the United States, Like, Tweet This Way?
Donald Trump described himself as “like, really smart.”
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Reuters Can Forensic Linguistics Pin Down the Author of a Trump Tweet?
Using data to assess whether the president's lawyer really wrote a message that renewed questions about obstruction of justice.
