John McWhorter
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Herb Ball / NBCU Photo Bank / Getty Curses Aren’t ‘Just Words’
A word is presented; a curse is squirted. This is part of why curses can be so utterly disconnected from their technical meanings.
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Adam Maida / The Atlantic Words Have Lost Their Common Meaning
The word racism, among others, has become maddeningly confusing in current usage.
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The Atlantic Schools Must Resist Destructive Anti-racist Demands
Contrary to what activists seem to believe, campuses are not bastions of social injustice.
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Getty / Shutterstock / The Atlantic Who’s the Snowflake Now?
If the right likes to call out left-wing theatrical exaggerations, it has also learned from them and in the past weeks has emulated them.
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Callaghan O'Hare / Reuters The Black People Who Voted for Trump Know He’s Racist
Trump’s nonwhite support suggests a gulf between how the “woke” left processes racism and how many people in the real world do.
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Shutterstock / The Atlantic Academics Are Really, Really Worried About Their Freedom
Some fear for their career because they don’t believe progressive orthodoxies.
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Joe Raedle / Getty Trader Joe’s Knows That Petitions Aren’t Commandments
The company decided not to rebrand its Trader Giotto and Trader José product lines.
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The Atlantic The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility
The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people.
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The Atlantic The Dictionary Definition of Racism Has to Change
Dictionaries can lag behind societal developments, and the idea that a “word” indisputably “means” what dictionaries say is simply sloppy.
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Sebastian Scheiner / AP The Coronavirus Generation Will Use Language Differently
Being out of school for half a year could change children’s relationship with formal expression.
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Alex Brandon / AP The Surgeon General Meets the Language Police
Jerome Adams acknowledged the vulnerability of people of color—but ran afoul of a powerful ideology.
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Yana Paskova / Getty Images Bloomberg Flunks the Wokeness Test
Stop-and-frisk was awful. But to disqualify the former New York mayor from the presidency on that basis is to risk something more destructive: a second term for Trump.
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Bryan Woolston / Reuters Troops Is an Unethical Euphemism
A soldier is a person. A troop is something from the game of Risk.
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Carlo Allegri / Reuters Why Latinx Can’t Catch On
New words stick when they come from below, and respond to a real need.
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Scott Morgan / Reuters The Woke Attack on Pete Buttigieg
In The Root, Michael Harriot misreads the presidential candidate’s old comments on role models.
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Andrea Comas / Reuters The Show-Trial Rhetoric That Took Down a Charter-School Founder
A petition accusing Steven Wilson of “white supremacist” language makes no sense, and barely tries to.
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Carlo Allegri / Reuters Don’t Use the Word Emolument
It’s outdated. Why not use plain language instead?
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Erin Scott / Reuters Trump’s a Liddle’ Scary
The president’s linguistic life is as oral as that of a medieval artisan.
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Jose Luis Gonzalez / Reuters The F-Word Is Going the Way of Hell
In today’s world, slurs are the real profanity, not the use of an “F-bomb” to describe a mass shooting.
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Associated Press The Idea That Whites Can’t Refer to the N-Word
It’s long been accepted that the slur shouldn’t be used by white people to refer to black people. What about referring to the word itself?
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