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How many ways can one graduate? The word has many meanings beyond the typical pomp and circumstance associated with colleges each spring.
I have assumed deprecate meant 鈥渢o belittle.鈥� As it turns out, I am far from the first person to have been baffled by this word.
It may seem that these two words must be related, but etymologically they are more like opposites than cousins.
How did a single animal get one field name and an entirely different food name? To answer that question, our grammar columnist takes a page from 鈥淚vanhoe.鈥�
How is a swan like a sonata? This sounds like the setup for a joke, but it鈥檚 more of an etymological riddle.
For many language learners, fluency feels impossible. But being fluent is more about familiarity and confidence in writing and speaking than perfection.
As scientists entertain the possibility of life on other planets, astrobiologists have had to rethink their vocabulary.
When people adapt their style of speech (or texting) to that of their conversational partners, it鈥檚 what linguists call accommodation.
Sea shanties like Wellerman have gone viral on TikTok recently. But where did they originate, and why are they suddenly popular now?
Etymologically, filibuster has more to do with conflict than with consensus. Fittingly, conflict is what filibusters tend to create in legislatures.
Sometimes there are rough rules for forming demonyms, terms that denote the inhabitants of a particular place. But in irregular cases, there are none.
Some demonyms 鈥� or words 鈥渦sed to denote a person who inhabits or is native to a particular place鈥� 鈥� are obvious, but others are impossible to guess.
Learnings is often seen as pretentious and useless business jargon, but its cousin teachings is pretty unobjectionable. What鈥檚 the difference?
Whataboutism is an old rhetorical technique. If Mary accuses John of something, John responds by accusing Mary of something: 鈥淲hat about ... ?鈥�
It鈥檚 easy to define patriot 鈥� one who loves his or her country, per Merriam-Webster 鈥� but harder to agree on what that love should entail.
Many animal names have undergone verbification, or turned from nouns into verbs. To parrot is to 鈥渞epeat by rote鈥� without understanding, for example.
The year 2020 gave rise to so many new words that the editors at Oxford Languages couldn鈥檛 pick just one word of the year (WOTY).
No one knows how bacon became associated with money, but etymologists have fun speculating. Possible answers are county fairs and English traditions.
The strange phrase 鈥� the clue is in the custard? 鈥� is just one of many odd and interesting food idioms in English.
