By Geoffrey Pullum. One very specific desire I have is to reach the end of my life (a long time from now) without ever having used the phrase working closely with. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. For grammar bullies “the subjunctive” is sacred ground. Reforms proposed for the British national curriculum in 2012 required teaching use of the subjunctive not later than sixth grade. People seem to think the subjunctive is a fragile flower on which civilization depends; without our intervention it will fade and die, and something beautiful, fragile, and important will be lost. More...

By Ben Yagoda. In Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony, the presenter J.K. Simmons described The Danish Girl as a film about someone who had undergone “gender-confirmation surgery.” I immediately recognized the phrase — which I wasn’t aware of encountering before — as a foot soldier in a political war. That is, Simmons’s formulation implicitly cast aside other terms for the same thing, such as “gender-reassignment surgery” or the old-fashioned “sex-change operation,” so as to advance a point of view. More...

By Ben Yagoda. Randye Green, an observant friend of mine, commented not long ago that she’s tired of perfect. Not because the perfect is the enemy of the good, but because, as she said, the word has become such a cliché. More...

By Ben Yagoda. On Thursday, Mitt Romney played the “Have-you-no-decency?” card against the Republican front-runner for president. More...

By Ben Yagoda. It’s a venerable word, dating from Middle English and in currency ever since. Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort (1535) has the line, “Howe wonderfull houge and greate those spiritual heauenly Ioyes [joys] are.” Translating Homer in 1791, William Cowper wrote, “So moved huge Ajax to the fight.” But huge has been on a roll the last several decades. You can discern that from a nifty Times tool called Chronicle; a la Google Ngram Viewer, you can type in any word or phrase and see frequency of use in the newspaper’s pages over the years. More...

By Ben Yagoda. Clearly, woo woo has hit center stage, or at least that portion of it occupied by The New York Times. And what exactly is woo woo? Deepak Chopra offered a rather defensive definition in a 2011 Huntington Post piece: “It used to annoy me to be called the king of woo woo. More...