The pictures have been coming out of Gaza for weeks--not the regular pictures of buildings falling in, smoke billowing to the sky, people fleeing gunfire. The new pictures are of small children, ...

President Barack Obama was proud to become the first sitting president to address Planned Parenthood last Friday. But not proud enough to utter the word “abortion.” The right to abortion is the ...

Historically, euphemism has been correlated to fear or superstition. For example, often times we hear death referred to as passing away; while death is inevitable, avoiding direct reference to it both ...

MODERN American speech, while not always clear or correct or turned with much style, is supposed to be uncommonly frank. Witness the current explosion of four-letter words and the explicit discussion ...

The mainstream press has been criticized for normalizing, or “sanewashing,” Donald Trump and his political allies. Having spent my career migrating back and forth between “straight news” and opinion ...

Each year, linguists, lexicographers and other language nuts gather at an annual conference under the banner of the American Dialect Society. The highlight of the confab is a raucous vote for choosing ...