English runs on borrowed words most speakers never think twice about. Kindergarten came from German. Karaoke came from Japanese. Déjà vu and zeitgeist and schadenfreude arrived, kept their original spelling, and simply moved in. Meanwhile, for every word that survives the crossing intact, thousands of others get quietly swapped ...Read More
There are two ways to get from one end of a book to the other. One is a highway: fast, direct, and built to get you to the last page with the least friction possible. The other is the old road that runs beside it, the one that takes ...Read More
I have spent close to two decades reading other people's drafts, first as a writer trying to figure out how sentences work, then as an editor whose whole job is noticing what a writer almost said. One thing shows up across thousands of manuscripts, academic and creative and corporate ...Read More
Here are two things that are both true, according to recent research. People who choose harder, more effortful words when they apologize are perceived as more sincere. People whose apology sounds too smooth, too rehearsed, are perceived as less sincere. Set those two findings side by side and they seem ...Read More
Here is the contradiction sitting inside one of the most commonly used words in English. "Literally" exists to do one job: to tell a listener that what follows is not an exaggeration, not a figure of speech, not a colorful way of putting things, but the plain truth. And ...Read More
Picture the message landing in your inbox. It opens with your name, maybe even a pleasant enough greeting, and then, three words in: "Per my last email." Nothing about the sentence that follows is rude on paper. It is polite, grammatically clean, and technically just a pointer back to ...Read More