The voting is in, and the American Dialect Society’s Slang Word of the Year is… yeet. Yeet is not so well known to oldsters, but it is in vogue among the youth. Its popularity demonstrates a central fact of how vocabulary spreads. It also leads us to Bugs Bunny, Clark …
My first job, selling sundries the summer I was 12 to the cottagers and campers who flocked to Cape Breton’s fabled Mira River, was about as far from the language business as you can get. Yet a few days in, I learned a humbling linguistic lesson. Three times the customer …
When I took on the commitment, a year ago, of contributing blog postings about language, I began bravely by tossing out a little ditty that came into my mind, inspired by Dr. Seuss: “New words, old words, shy words, bold words.” Well, I’ve talked about old words and new words, …