A Walk in the WoRds

Am I the only one who has a problem with the name of Subway's new menu item? There are just too many options for the phonetic rea...

Thankfully, I did not have to "bang a left" while visiting Boston this past week; I left all the driving to the expertise of the ...

I'm not really in the mood for a Samuel Smith's, so... make it a Wig Top IA. As explained at Wikipedia - India Pale ...

He has been the host of a popular television game show since 1984 and is said to be  contemplating retirement  in the next two years. ...

Cartoon by Chris Yoder .

rhotic A term used in English phonology referring to dialects or accents where /r/ is pronounced following a vowel, as in car and cart . V...

Two of my favorite language-related illustrations. From the book Shapes for sounds by Timothy Donaldson, via brain pickings . From an artic...

Back in January, I posted about a linguistic phenomenon that I observed and was unable to label. The original post titled "Contraction ...

What is the correct past tense form of the verb to text ? This question has come up quite a bit recently in conversations I have had with fr...

I hope you enjoy these two mini-lectures with Professor Anne Curzan from the University of Michigan. Part 1, The Word on Language and Gram...

What happens when a person starts to utter a contraction and then for some unknown reason decides to utter the two word phrase instead of th...

A good friend spotted this sign in a restroom at Disney World and snapped a photo to share with me. He commented that it amazed him how much...

Following is a reader's comment on a recent post about paraprosdokians . I've always loved gags like this -- "I want to die pe...

The fact that native Spanish speakers have difficulty pronouncing the English word "skate" indicates that English and Spanish_____...

The correct answer to the First in a Series of Occasional Linguistics Quizzes is b . English and Spanish have different phonotactic constrai...

Mom - You are the greatest and thank you for putting up with the utter chaos I caused at times. Hope you have an utter ly outstanding day. ...

The September 21st issue of Newsweek magazine includes an article titled "Born to be Big". Following is the opening sentence of th...

Most people are familiar with the New York accent, the Boston accent and the Southern accent. However, the term "accent" really re...