Category Archives: The Week

Is 😂 a word?

Posted on December 8, 2015 | 2 comments

My latest article for The Week looks at emoji and emoticons – little icons of facial expressions and gestures and objects – and asks two important linguistic questions: Are they words? And if so, what kind of words are they?

Is an emoji a word? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Posted in The Week

Tagged emoji, emojis, emoticons, Oxford Word of the Year, The Week, words

Phonological aspirations

Posted on December 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

Do you wish you could have an easier time with non-English sound distinctions? Do you have a sense there are sounds that sound the same to you but are heard as different in other languages? Give this a listen – it’s the podcast version of my article on subtle sounds English speakers have a hard time telling apart.

5 subtle sounds that English speakers have trouble catching

The bird from everywhere but where it’s from

Posted on November 25, 2015 | 3 comments

The turkey, as you may know, does not come from Turkey. It also does not come from France, India, Rome, or Peru. And yet its names in different languages around the world attribute it to those places. So… why? Find out in my latest article for The Week:

How the Thanksgiving turkey was named after the country Turkey

3 Comments

Posted in The Week

Tagged etymology, name, The Week, turkey

Do you do tai chi on Halloween in Hawaii?

Posted on October 31, 2015 | 1 comment

My latest article for The Week deals with the tricky question above – and whether it should be “Do you do t’ai chi on Hallowe’en in Hawai‘i?”

The wacky world of apostrophes, explained

1 Comment

Posted in The Week

Tagged apostrophes, Hallowe'en, Hawai'i, O'Hara, Qur'an, t'ai chi, The Week, Xi'an

R u OK w Hillary’s emails?

Posted on September 29, 2015 | 3 comments

The release of emails to and from Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state has provided much interest and entertainment. One thing that caught my eye immediately was the use of abbreviated forms such as thx, pls, w, and especially u. So I wrote an article for The Week about it (I didn’t give it the title, though):

Hillary Clinton, and the surprising history of elder statesmen writing like tweens

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Posted in The Week

Tagged email, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, pls, The Week, thx, u, W

The mp clan

Posted on September 18, 2015 | 1 comment

My latest for The Week looks at phonaesthetics without ever actually using the word phonaesthetics (I thought readers might glaze over at the technical term). It also looks at an oddity in terms of distribution of sound combinations in English. It is…

The curious linguistic histories of ump, imp, amp, omp, and empt

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Posted in The Week

Tagged amp, emp, empt, imp, mp, omp, phonaesthemes, phonaesthetics, the mp clan, ump

Here’s me saying some words that no one says “correctly”

Posted on August 5, 2015 | Leave a comment

My latest podcast for The Week comes from my article on words we don’t say the “proper” (unexpected) way anymore. In case my pronunciation guides didn’t communicate well, now you can hear me saying them:

5 words we’ve forgotten how to pronounce

2050: The podcast

Posted on July 8, 2015 | Leave a comment

Remember that article I did on what American English will sound like in 2050? The one I had radio interviews about? We’ve made a podcast of it:

What Americans will sound like in 2050

Don’t be so possessive

Posted on July 7, 2015 | 1 comment

My latest article for The Week looks at the rationale people give for wanting to leave the apostrophe out of Father(’)s Day, Mother(’)s Day, etc.: the fathers, mothers, and others don’t possess the days, so we shouldn’t use the possessive. And so here we see one of the most badly misnamed features in English grammar:

Stop calling possessives ‘possessive’

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Posted in The Week

Tagged Fathers Day, genitive, Mothers Day, possessive, Presidents Day, The Week, Veterans Day