By William Germano. There are people who fear the 13th of the month, especially when it comes on a Friday. Put in plain English, that seems laughable, a superstition incompatible with 21st-century rationality. But put another way, in classical Greek, and you have the serious malady named by the American psychiatrist Isador Coriat a century ago: triskaidekaphobia. More...

By William Germano. You’ve got to feel sorry for the Right Shark, who unlike the Right Whale, really was on the right, and in the right, too.
As readers of Lingua Franca know, the fabulously expensive entertainment known as the Super Bowl consists of two frequently interrupted episodes of male violence that sandwich the thing many viewers turn in for. I mean, of course, the Halftime Show. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Bryan Henderson’s hobby is eliminating comprised of  from Wikipedia articles. Just another quixotic purist struggling to retard linguistic evolution? That’s what people seemed to think I’d say, as they busied themselves sending me links to Andrew McMillen’s Backchannel article about Henderson. But the situation is subtle, and head-swirlingly complex. I’ll explain as clearly as I can. Comprise yourself—I mean compose yourself. More...

By Ben Yagoda. I picked up The Philadelphia Inquirer last week and read an article by Jeremy Roebuck about how a judicial ruling had revived the onetime local news anchor Alycia Lane’s long-dormant lawsuit against her former station. Here’s the line my eye was drawn to: “‘We’re back,’ Lane’s attorney Paul R. Rosen singsonged in an interview Friday, giving his best Poltergeist impression.” More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I heard the news of Harper Lee’s new novel—or, to be precise, of the planned release of the companion novel to To Kill a Mockingbird that she penned many decades ago—while I was doing research at the Missouri Historical Library and Research Center. My own subject, still vaguely outlined, is the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, now more than a century in the past. Lee’s subject, of course, was the Jim Crow racism that prevailed in the mid-20^th century American South. More...