By Ben Yagoda. Where’s the outrage?
People never stop getting upset about changes in the use of pronouns (“thanks for inviting me wife and me/I”), verbs (comprise/compose), and nouns (data is/data are), but, with the exception of occasional squawks about those who say “different than” (or, in Britain, “different to”) instead of “different from,” they don’t seem to give a hoot about the pervasive phenomenon I call “preposition creep.”
Three examples come to mind. First is the change from enamored of  to enamored with. As the Google Ngram Viewer chart below shows, in 1920, enamored with barely existed, but by 2008 (the last year for which Google provides data), it was used more than half as commonly as the traditional enamored of. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. I recently asked readers to think of a technical term for a kind of rhetorical structure for witticisms like the classic lawyer joke: “Q. What’s the difference between a catfish and a lawyer? A. One is a bottom-dwelling, scum-sucking scavenger, and the other is a fish.” It’s very familiar. But, I wondered, is there a suitably exact rhetorical technical term for the device?
I got some interesting suggestions in the Comments (24). Some felt far too general: Gavin Moodie suggested counterpoint; a commenter called chaucered came up with sleight of word; John Baker held that conundrum might do; but none of these seemed focused enough to me. More...

By Ilan Stavans. “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet,” says Juliet. And Romeo, a few lines later, replies, “My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself.”
Onomatology, also known as onomastics, is the discipline that studies proper names. In the United States, that discipline borders on extravagance, although it never ceases to amaze me how, in spite of the rapid transformation of American society, things remain constant. More...

By Anne Curzan. This past weekend I received an email asking if I might comment on a heated debate about spelling at a School of Medicine. The email came from a professor in the “Department of Orthopaedic Surgery”—and I use quotes here because the spelling matters. The spell checker in Microsoft Word puts a red squiggly line under orthopaedic. It prefers orthopedic, and that’s the crux of the problem. The department is fighting to retain the “a” in orthopaedic, in the face of a higher-level administrative decision to lose the “a” and refer to the department as orthopedic. From the department’s perspective, orthopaedic is the only “correct” spelling. More...

By Allan Metcalf. What’s wrong with American education nowadays?
Take your pick. You can lament lack of support for the humanities, or lack of student interest in science. If you’re concerned about the latter, you have a word for it. An acronym, actually: STEM. It stands for those areas of underinterest to students: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. More...