language

Anyone who's been in or around the military knows that to "police up" the area is to pick up trash, and "police call" is a morning ritual to do same... But in response to a Quora question today, I tried for about 20 minutes to find the origin of this term... How "police" became a synonym for...

I love learning new - to me - words and their meanings. It seems that I recall a few years back there was a thread about favorite words, but I couldn't locate them. Here are two that have caught my eye: Lalochezia. It is a feeling of emotional relief that comes after a person swears...

I've noticed this usage a lot lately. Usually used in the context of "a woman politician", "a woman athlete", etc, or as below in the picture. It just sounds really odd to me. The dictionary entries I checked still list it solely as a noun. Is "female" as an adjective now considered gauche...

Also "Sceptic". It's been well and truly hijacked and is now worthless. "I'm skeptical of climate change" means the person is a denier. "I'm skeptical of vaccines" is double-speak for "I'm ant-vax." "I'm skeptical of Covid....." means the person is a conspiracist loon. The term is done and...

Even as a little kid it was obvious to me Indians didn't have red skin. Asians never looked "yellow" and only extreme outliers were "black" or "white." It seemed to me most people were either beige or dark brown. In reading books on China I've read that Englishmen were considered to have "red"...

Coon cheese's name to be changed over racism concerns Do you agree?

An Indianapolis police officer was livid earlier this month when he discovered a bite had been taken out of his chicken sandwich. The officer ordered his food prior to the beginning of his shift and placed the bag in a refrigerator when he arrived at the county prison. Several hours later, he...

The sad event outside the White House the other day provoked a question from an aquaintance on seeing a headline which began "Man shoots himself..." He argues it ought to be "Man shot himself". I said either were perfectly correct, though unable to explain the difference in tenses, and my...

From here. This type of change had not even occurred to me. Congressman and Postman feel male but somehow freshman doesn't, like mankind doesn't - probably because I have been in those groups. Freshwoman sounds catchy! Are there more terms that we don't think twice about that will be...

and although they overlap not to be confused with coney-catch of course. Anyway the University of York has apparently published a list of old words that are useful for the modern world/have comedy value...

I'm teaching a high school-level statistics course. There is no class set of textbooks but I have a teachers edition I'm loosely using as a curriculum guide. I was browsing through "measures of dispersal" and found this sentence: I asked students if they could spot a logical flaw in the...

May I make a plea for written English and discourage this illiterate "is [not] a thing" crap? We have words rather more precise and appropriate for a reason. For instance, our local self-described coward couls have said, "Unwritten rules are an oxymoron," or, "Unwritten rules have no practical...

So what is the general consensus in 2016. Assume you are writing not just on an internet forum, but something for a client or for your company and it needs to be professional. I am currently editing a document and the term "user" comes up a lot, and I don't like "he or she", "himself or...

Take the phrase " roses grew on each side of the path". Should that be "roses grew on either side of the path"? I've always written it the as "each" but I hear more people saying "either"

Hi grammarians, grammar nazis and plain old pedants. :D So I came across this usage in a Gizmodo article about high-speed trains, and it just rubbed me the wrong way. Am I right? Here's the sentence: Why not just plain 'serve'? Why use 'service' as a verb here? I mean, I understand that one...

This is probably a really easy question to answer, but I have almost no 'formal' knowledge of English and when I looked online I couldn't find a good answer. Do all verbs in English have opposites? There seem to be plenty of 'obvious' pairs, but do they even count as opposites? Is this only for...

Would it be worth it to just throw out our whole system of writing and start over from scratch with something more efficient and logical? Downsides: Everyone would have to forget what they know and relearn how to read and right, albeit with a simpler, easier system. All books and written...

Lede

What would be the Plattdüütsch translation of that English word?

A brief back-and-forth between my sister-in-law and myself on Facebook, I wrote this sentence (in support of gay and transgender rights.) "whenever I see someone make a comment about gays marrying, or transgenders using the "wrong" bathroom" She then got snippy, and stated that "it's...

Chomsky has long advocated that language is innate with a core universal structure. At the root of this structure is the concept of recursion: that sentences can be made longer and longer with the addition of concepts joined with specialized words sort of like what I am doing with this sentence...

Here's a quiz on the winning words since 1925 in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. This was hard!! So I'm happy to have got 79% (66 out of 84). http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/0531/Think-you-can-spell-Take-our-Spelling-Bee-quiz/1925 See how well you can do!

Not being a native American, I'm just curious. :D You don't say Rowte 66, do you? And you've got nothing against the French...?

I recently learned something interesting about the grammatical history of the English language: "You" used to be plural (it still is grammatically plural: we say "you are" not "you is"). The singular form of "you" was "ye" or "thou." But nowadays nobody uses "ye" or "thou" anymore, and "you" is...

There is a term from my language (Hmaikhah si lo) that loosely means you are "unworthy" of any privileges, say, in someone house, BECAUSE it's their house and you don't want to be rude or excessively too comfy. Ex. A sick person is brought in and taken care of in a stranger's home. Days later...

The last ten years or so, I have been hearing people I know use the word "Jive" in place of "Jibe" with increasing frequency. Has anyone else seen this, or is it just us hicks here in the mid-west U.S.A.? I usually address it like this: Person: "A doesn't jive with B." Me: "So you are...

Okay obviously this is somewhat a response to the plethora of beyond even solipsist level navel gazing posts that have hit the board recently, but it did lead me to a serious train of thought because the "I can't describe it linguistically, ergo it doesn't exist" argument is used a lot as a...

When I read about various causes of death in the overall human crowd, something seems wrong to me. Is it fair to say that so and so, 90 years old, died of heart disease? Or lung cancer? When so many other death-inducing factors were nipping at her heels? The implication is, that if we could...

Scientists may be a step closer to understanding the origins of human language http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8405806.stm In the menu it's less measured: "'Boom, krak-oo, hok' - scientists translate monkey talk"

My friend and I find much humor in the word "Jewess," given that it sounds so outdated and odd in any conversation, which is why we always find reason to use it anyway. We were both troubled that no word specifically referring to a female Christian existed in English, thus gave rise to the word...