By William Germano. Buzz Lightyear, the challenged but adorable astronaut of the Toy Story films, sets high goals for himself. To infinity — and beyond, he exclaims, as earnestly as an animated toy might hope to. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. In my post last week I cited a few ways in which English is unsuitable as a global language, and mentioned that its being one anyway is attributable at least in part to undeserved luck.
Of course, it wasn’t all luck. British imperialism and the African slave trade laid the foundations. Even today, with the empire gone, English has about 400 million native speakers, on all seven continents, and about a billion and a half use it for some purposes. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Utrecht, Holland— My mission in this pleasant central Holland town: giving a keynote address at the 25th anniversary conference of Sense (originally the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors, now a general professional organization of anglophone editors in the Netherlands) in the palatial surroundings of the beautifully restored 16th-century Paushuize. More...

By Allan Metcalf. You would think that someone closest in time and place to the emergence of a new word would be the best authority about its origin. More...

By Allan Metcalf. Welcome to December! Yesterday was the first of the month, time for your Word of the Month: merry.
That’s right. As a member  of the Word of the Month Club, you’re entitled to use this month’s word on any and every occasion. More...

By Allan Metcalf. David Barnhart comes from a lexicographical dynasty. He and his late brother, Robert, have both been in the profession of making dictionaries, following in the footsteps of their famous father Clarence L. Barnhart, author of the Thorndike-Barnhart series of dictionaries. More...

By Allan Metcalf. When I saw an article on Friendsgiving in The Wall Street Journal last week, I knew I had a topic for the day before Thanksgiving: giving words. A long list, that is, of words ending in -giving, like those two. More...

By Ben Yagoda. Last week, referring to Ben Carson’s (supposedly) terrible temper, Donald Trump said, “I don’t want a person that’s got a pathological disease.”
What caught my eye was that he didn’t say, “… a person who’s got a pathological disease.” For some years, I have been noticing that my students favor the choice of that over who as a relative pronoun. More...

By Anne Curzan. Does it matter if things have been proved or proven? I ask this as a grammatical question, not a philosophical one about the nature of evidence. Does it matter if one uses proved or proven as the past participle of the verb prove. More...