Thanks to the evolution of language, technology, and lots of hyperbole, these words used to convey a lot more merit, emotion, or simply seriousness than they do nowadays. Ah, “genius.” Once reserved ...

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...

Children learn language effortlessly and completely voluntarily. They learn new words miraculously fast. A teenager masters about 60,000 words of their mother tongue by the time they finish high ...

It’s a very satisfying thing to learn that there’s a word for an experience you didn’t know could be described by a word. Learning that, for example, clinomania is an “excessive desire to stay in bed” ...