Ben Zimmer
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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.
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Kevin Lamarque / Reuters Looking for the Linguistic Smoking-Gun in a Trump Tweet
Could the word pled really reveal who wrote Trump’s reaction to the Flynn news?
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AP The Delights of Parsing the Beatles' Most Nonsensical Song
Released 50 years ago, “I Am the Walrus” is endlessly analyzable, and yet somehow analysis-proof.
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Zynga TFW You Can Play 'TFW' in Words With Friends
Why the popular mobile game is adding certain abbreviations to its lexicon—breaking with a rule held sacred by its forebear, Scrabble
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George Hammerstein / Getty / Zak Bickel / ... 'Casting Couch': The Origins of a Pernicious Hollywood Cliché
How a seemingly innocuous phrase became a metonym for the skewed sexual politics of show business
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Google's Ngram Viewer Goes Wild
With the addition of wildcard search-term capabilities, Google's fabulous language-analysis tool gets even more powerful.
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Bigger, Better Google Ngrams: Brace Yourself for the Power of Grammar
An update to Google's Ngram Viewer gives us a much deeper portrait of how English is changing, but still has some weaknesses.
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The Rise of the Zuckerverb: The New Language of Facebook
This is what happens when language is optimized for social data-mining rather than natural communication
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The Corpus in the Court: 'Like Lexis on Steroids'
Say goodbye to the dictionary definition. Courts, long dependent on the vagaries of language, have new quantitative tools they can use to precisely pin down how words are used.
