Author Archive

Save an endangered word, redefine the dictionary

I’ve always found it curious that the Americans have no centralized institution which establishes the end-all be-all of language. I mean, something along the lines of the German Rechtschreibungen, grammars that all of which incorporated a rather catastrophic spelling reform mandated by an official agreement between German-speaking countries in 1996. Or the Real Academia Española [...]


Par for the course? Ladies’ golf ditches English-only policy

I’m willing to wager that even those who’ve been speaking English their whole lives couldn’t tell you with confidence what a bogey or a mulligan is. Sports vocabulary has always constituted something of a rarefied language. I mean, words like scrimmage, sack or blitz have got to sound like Greek to the unintiated. Yet the [...]