Effective communication is a hallmark of intelligence. It involves not just what you say, but how you say it. Smart individuals often choose their words carefully, prioritizing clarity, precision, and ...

Thanks to the evolution of language, technology, and lots of hyperbole, these words used to convey a lot more merit, emotion, or simply seriousness than they do nowadays. Ah, “genius.” Once reserved ...

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“MISOGYNY” SEEMS a straightforward word. In dictionaries, it is “hatred of women”. In its etymology are the Greek verb misein, to hate, and gyne, women. The word, like the sentiment, has been around ...

It’s a very satisfying thing to learn that there’s a word for an experience you didn’t know could be described by a word. Learning that, for example, clinomania is an “excessive desire to stay in bed” ...

Children learn language effortlessly and completely voluntarily. They learn new words miraculously fast. A teenager masters about 60,000 words of their mother tongue by the time they finish high ...

Decades after I began writing about language, there are still words I avoid out of fear I’ll use them wrong. And worse: Some of these are terms I’ve learned, written about, then promptly forgotten.