By Lucy Ferriss. I didn’t know I was named for the devil until I studied on an exchange program in Belgium. There, I would be introduced as “Mademoiselle Luci Férriss,” and the people who had begun stretching out their hands would recoil. “Lucifer!” they exclaimed more than once. “Why would your parents have saddled you with such a name?”
The answer, of course, is that my parents hadn’t thought they were naming me after the Prince of Darkness. The origin of my first name is the Latin word for light. The origin of my last name is probably the Latin ferrum, referring to ironmakers somewhere back in the family tree; but it could also be the Latin ferre, “to carry,” which made Lucifer the bringer of light, or the dawn. In any case, I’ve rather enjoyed being named after a fallen angel, especially when I’ve found people from other cultures also studying the name in puzzlement. More...

By Ben Yagoda. Idea for a sitcom: The Big Lang. Theory. Premise is that a bunch of language nerds sit around and talk about their observations, obsessions, and pet peeves. Let’s say their names are Geoffrey, Lucy, Allan, and Ben, and that they’ve got some wacky neighbors, Bill, Anne, Ilan, and Rose. For the pilot episode,  one of the gang, scouring the databases and corpora, thinks she has found a use of a word published prior to the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. But it turns out to come from a book that Google Books gave an incorrect date to. Hilarity ensues. More...

By William Germano. So I walk into the little dry cleaners near my office and these are the first words I hear:
“Where were you?  In bed with your—Polack!”
For a split second I’m stopped in my tracks. More...