Language
Story Stream
You Can Just Say Things July 23, 2025
How important is the freedom not to care — not to have to care — about being overheard? If you’re a parent (or even if you’re not one), when children are around, you should watch what you say. When you speak, you are modeling proper behavior for them...
The Poet as Archeologist July 17, 2025
In her new poetry collection, Before the Forest Burns (Kelsay Books, 2025), Leslie Monsour works as a poet-archeologist, using language as a trowel, brush, and magnifying glass with which she explores real and metaphorical landscapes. The poems thems...
How TikTok is Transforming the English Language July 16, 2025
It seems as though everything happens faster on the internet. Each week brings a dizzying parade of new memes, fads, and slang words that evaporate as quickly as they materialize. It can be hard to keep up with the latest references unless you’re spe...
Painting the Revolution July 15, 2025
Percy Bysshe Shelley famously called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” He argued in “A Defense of Poetry” that they “measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit” to ...
On (Middle-Class) Frugality July 11, 2025
At the beginning of last year, I decided that if I could cut my family’s weekly expenses, not including mortgage payments, to $400, then our life would be better. Optimized. Simpler. Less cluttered. There had to be a trick to it, a hack, such that if...
The Language of Stones July 10, 2025
“Infinitely far from the world of flowers,” sighs Novalis. What about the world of stones! And where along the way do we pick up the idea that we know what we’re talking about?Of course, the question only makes sense to those who believe that nothing...
The War on Cliché July 08, 2025
My university writing lecturer was a curious, combative chap born some 120 years too late. Composition class sprung into motion at exactly nine a.m. Doe-eyed stragglers, their breath forming on the locked door window, got used to time not as a fluid ...
Translation and Taste July 03, 2025
Translation suggests that there are many ways of being good—but no sure method. A sentence in a foreign language can be translated successfully into our own by a number of different English sentences, none of which will replicate the original’s liter...
The Emoji Tongue July 03, 2025
In 2015, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary went all-in on the still-novel phenomenon of emoji. That year, the guardians of the venerable OED named the FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY emoji (😂)—now, as then, the world’s most popular emoji—as Word o...
To the Postbox July 01, 2025
In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of Woolf’s work. ‘I should much prefer that the book s...
Extraterrestrial Tongues May 14, 2025
In the movie Arrival (2016), a seven-limbed alien species lands on Earth with a language that no human can understand. The aliens – dubbed Heptapods – are obliging enough to provide room in their spaceship for linguistic exchanges, but the team charg...
The Sleepers May 08, 2025
Akari was on the couch, scrolling Instagram.Her body was small, but she was very toned and lean from yoga and pilates classes, so she appeared longer than she was. And though her eyes were cast down, she was aware that Dan was staring at her, studyin...
We, Robots May 08, 2025
Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 large-language model (LLM) in November 2022, AI has been all over the news. Media coverage typically communicates the same message: AI is smart and getting smarter. Sometimes stories hype its growing intellig...
The Profanity Trend Is Tired and Played Out May 07, 2025
In 1985 – when I was 7 – the young kids in my neighborhood had a “swear club.” To join, the initiate had to hide behind a tree with the assembled members and say every swear word he knew. It was less common for children our age to encounter profanity...
The Pedagogic Life May 07, 2025
How does one teach a church of 1.4 billion people? That is, after all, part of the office of the Pope: the “ordinary universal magisterium,” that ponderous slab of Catholic theological Kunstsprache, is simply the Pope’s duty to teach the entire Catho...
Methodical Banality May 06, 2025
The Renaissance scholar and educator Erasmus of Rotterdam opens his polemical treatise The Ciceronian (1528) by describing the utterly dysfunctional writing process of a character named Nosoponus. The Ciceronian is structured as a dialogue, with two ...
My Brain Finally Broke May 06, 2025
I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegib...
The Jester's Power May 05, 2025
The moral language of our time seems to me to be like this: an asteroid hit the other side of the planet, and the cloud is going to get you soon. However, there’s still time before you smell the smoke yourself. You would like to express to your frien...
