Dick Durbin would like to have a word with the professoriate. It seems that the phrase “chain migration”—a technical term used for decades by university-based demographers to describe family-based migration patterns—is in fact racist. The Illinois senator suggested as much last month, after…
I recently saw a sportswriter on social media paying tribute to a deceased editor he’d had the pleasure of working with. “The best editors are a psychologist, a friend, an idea person, a life vest,” he wrote. “Every story written is a trust fall into an editor’s arms.” I don’t doubt this sentiment…
In 1992, the exiled Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide spoke to Jewish leaders in New York City. Having studied for three years in Jerusalem, he spoke to them in Hebrew as well as English. Aristide was slightly shocked to discover, after the talk, that he was not understood: Most of the…
The first words I learned in Italian were gamba di legno, or wooden leg, for which Benito Mussolini and Walt Disney are to blame: After the war, my mother, who was fluent in Italian, had been involved with a charity that provided artificial limbs for Italian amputees. And for decades thereafter,…
Politics being one damn thing after another, political language never sleeps. Fortunately, the insomniac hunter of neologisms David K. Barnhart has compiled a lexicon of au courant political terms. Should confirmation be needed that Americans are innovative, democratic, and deranged by…
Politics being one damn thing after another, political language never sleeps. Fortunately, the insomniac hunter of neologisms David K. Barnhart has compiled a lexicon of au courant political terms. Should confirmation be needed that Americans are innovative, democratic, and deranged by…
An old friend of The Scrapbook's posted on Facebook the other day an oblique commentary on this year's campaign: "I used to like the word 'tremendous' and not know the word 'bigly.' Those were happy days."
An old friend of The Scrapbook’s posted on Facebook the other day an oblique commentary on this year's campaign: "I used to like the word 'tremendous' and not know the word 'bigly.' Those were happy days."
Business schools are like sanatoriums for the English language—places where words go to languish and softly fade, easing towards a coughing, clichéd death.
When Hillary Clinton first launched her campaign in April, THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported that her website was asking for donations up to $2,700 on the English version of the site, but only up to $250 on the Spanish language version. Within hours after the story was published, the…
Ted Cruz, who tweeted last night that he's running for president, released his first Spanish language web ad. The ad touts his biography:
Florida Polytechnic “University” (it isn’t accredited) is making headlines this week by opening a bookless library. Instead of checking out traditional codex books, students will be forced to read class material on tablets, e-readers, and/or laptops. According to the middle-aged librarians and…
President Obama told a German audience today that the U.S. lags behind other countries because Americans don't speak enough foreign languages. It’s not the first time he’s expressed the sentiment: back in 2008, Obama said, “It's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English,…
At an event in Germany, President Obama said American youth lag behind their European counterparts because they are not taught "a second and third language." Via the pool report:
Of the making of books, Ecclesiastes informs us, there is no end. But of some books, perhaps, there should never have been a beginning. One such book, or so many believed when it first appeared, was Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. When published in…
The fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published by Houghton Mifflin, was released last fall. In the typecast world of dictionary publishing, American Heritage is the “conservative” dictionary. Developed in the 1960s in the wake of company president James Parton’s failed attempt to…
There is an old saw that if you torture statistics enough, they will tell you whatever you want to hear. Words are like this, too. In the interest of clarity during the current campaign season, here is a brief lexicon of how Democratic officials use words:
In Gambit, Rex Stout’s 1962 mystery novel, the quirky and housebound detective Nero Wolfe sits before a fireplace on a too-small chair, “tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged.” Why? “He…
I was surprised the other day at lunch when someone asked me a question that, I suppose, must come with age: Had I any regrets in life?
The apparent fall of the Qaddafi regime, and the likely capture (or killing) of the tyrant himself, will signal the end not only of four decades of internal repression and external terrorism, but one of the more vexing orthographic challenges in modern American journalism: the spelling of the…