By Ben Yagoda. The other day, the website Futility Closet posted a reproduction of a document from the National Archives. More...

By Ben Yagoda. Way back when I was taking “Introduction to French” during my freshman year in college, we were given a quiz a month or so into the term. At one point, the professor spoke some French words and we were asked to spell them. One of the words was the French phrase for “goodbye.”
This is what I wrote down: “orra voire.”
The professor had competently taught us that the term is “au revoir.” And I had learned it, up to a point. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. As a Luciferian from birth, I listened with interest when word of John Boehner’s recent characterization of the Republican candidate Ted Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh” got out. Apparently, there’s no worse insult. The Internet exploded after Boehner made his comment, accompanied by the apparently tamer “miserable son of a bitch,” at an interview at Stanford University. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. Hashtag. Pound sign. Space. And then there’s the use of the octothorpe to replace the word number, as in “He was #4 in the queue.” How did those little cross-hatched horizontal and vertical lines come to mean so many different things?
Apparently it begins, like so much else, with the Romans, whose abbreviation for libra pondo, or pound weight, was (as it still is) lb, but with a stylized l including a finishing, cursive-like slash across the center, to distinguish it from the number 1. By 1850, bookkeepers had adopted two uses of the octothorpe: If it followed a number, it retained the sense of pounds, but if it preceded a number, it simply indicated number. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Once again, the question insisted on a straight correct/incorrect binary choice between present perfect and preterite (exactly as with another such case I was recently asked to adjudicate on; why are test-devisers so intent on this?). I stressed that We respond as if we had been programmed and We respond as if we were programmed are both fully acceptable in the given context. More...