By Lucy Ferriss. When I used to think about the word skeptic, it was to wonder whether to spell it beginning sk or sc. No longer. Now that AP guidelines have recommended avoiding the term climate change skeptic, I find myself pondering the differences among skeptic, doubter, and denier. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I grew up singing carols, and I am still singing them, these days in an interfaith chorus that gives an annual holiday concert with audience participation. More...

By William Germano. When is Shakespeare’s play not a play but a novel? I don’t mean adaptations of Macbeth. There are lots of those — Paul Illidge’s Macbeth: A Prose Translation, the filmscript to Akira Kurosawa’s classic Throne of Blood (or, in Japanese, Spider’s Web Castle), the Classics Illustrated comic-book version, the Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø’s forthcoming noir fictionalization — to name just a few. More...

By Anne Curzan. I have a new favorite mug. It was given to me by the graduate students in the Joint Program in English and Education (JPEE) and celebrates my advocacy of singular they—with the explanatory footnote. More...

By Allan Metcalf. OK, word lovers. Here’s the perfect gift for yourself, or any other logophile: A whole year of the complete online Dictionary of American Regional English at your fingertips for only $47.50, half the usual subscription price. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Fred Shapiro’s magisterial Yale Book of Quotations cites 39 quotations from Arthur Conan Doyle, but surprisingly, only one comes from The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902): “They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”. More...

By Ben Yagoda. Last February I got a typewritten letter from inmate No. 1965977 (not her real number) in a state prison. Authors often get such letters, usually with detailed and hard-to-follow accounts of how the writer of the letter was unjustly accused, convicted, and/or treated. This one was different. More...