By Allan Metcalf. Dude, there seems to be no end to curiosity about the word that began as a label for a sissified dandy in New York City but developed into almost the coolest label for a young man nowadays, as well as a cool form of address to persons of any gender. Dude was unknown in 1882 but swept the nation in 1883, thanks to the equivalent of the Internet in those days: newapapers.
And yet—did the meme really begin on January 14, 1883, with an 84-line poem in the New York World by Robert Sale Hill? Or was dude in the air before Hill was there? More...

By Allan Metcalf. “Whenever I make a really bad joke,” Kaitlin Thomas wrote in TV.com on May 15, “I like to punch it up at the end by yelling, ‘Boom!’ It always makes me feel better, as if I’m my own one-woman self-confidence boost.”
TNT seems to have noticed booms like hers. More...

By Rose Jacobs. To spell-check or not to spell-check? Many people would find this question absurd: Of course you run spell-check on anything longer than a text message. Take some pride in your work! But I wandered away from that moral high ground recently after fiddling around with software called Lingofy that lets you run style-guide checks on your writing using The Associated Press Stylebook (or a style book of your own making). More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. It isn’t easy to admit being wrong in front of thousands of readers, but Ben Yagoda took it on the chin.
He had written this clause (I mark it with the asterisk that linguists use to signal ungrammaticality):
*The meaning of words inevitably and perennially change. More...

By Ben Yagoda. I know, enough already about Weird Al Yankovic’s “Word Crimes,” but bear with me for one more comment on the music video that’s given language prescriptivism it’s its biggest shot in the arm since the glory days of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Perhaps the weirdest of the 17 admonitions Weird Al crams into the song comes at about the halfway point, when he croons, “There’s no x in espresso,” over this image. More...

By Ben Yagoda. The emails come like clockwork, one or two every week. Sometimes they’re abusive, sometimes they’re  gleefully “gotcha,” and sometimes they’re civil and sincere, like this one (name of sender withheld):
I genuinely read and appreciate your articles, but this one stumped me. This sentence is near the end of your article in The Week,  published 14 March 2013: “As I noted in my previous article, the meaning of words inevitably and perennially change.”  If I was working with a student, I would correct the verb to read “changes.”  Can you give me a quick lesson if I’m incorrect? More...