I had a nice time trying out some of my recently Kindergarten-honed Deutsch with an Austrian friend last night, and he taught me really good thing to know.
You know how people often say, “I need my morning Latte”?
Also, do you know how to say it in German? It would be something like “Morgen [...]

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I only know two languages—English and German— marginally in both cases, but learning German exposed a big gap in English: the lack of a distinct method for distinguishing between the singular and plural pronoun for “you.”
For example, in German, based on the conjugation of the verb, one can discern the subject’s or objective pronoun’s number. [...]

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I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the headlines lately, and that is the use of “bow” as a verb, meaning to introduce something.
Why does this suck? Well, it sucks for a million reasons. First, we do not live in Japan or the Hapbsurg Empire of Olde. We do not bow [...]

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Like I was saying the other day:

In the old days when people studied traditional grammar, we could simply say, “The first person singular pronoun is “I” when it’s a subject and “me” when it’s an object,” but now few people know what that means. Let’s see if we can apply some common sense here. The [...]

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As any good Office Boy of the age, I get innumerable daily e-mail communications. Being pimped out from one company to another, I have to be inside the e-mail systems of two Fortune 100 corporations on a daily basis, so I get double the amount that most sorry suckers have to contend with. [...]

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Words form powerful symbolic networks and meshes of meaning within our brains. So I’m curious if it’s confusing for New Yorkers to hear people talking about things happening or available online, since New Yorkers have the peculiar habit of calling what most other American refer to as “in line” as “on line.”
Perhaps this little [...]

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My son, he takes a stuffed elephant, puts it under a pillow, and calls it suitcase.

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From now on, refer to me as a member of the snoozeoisie.

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Simon Duffy, “writer” for CNN, pulls out this doozy:
After that shooting, a suspect was chased on foot by police who came within a few feet of them before they escaped.
Since when is a suspect them?

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I’m not the most proficient wielder of the English language by any stretch, but several trends in English usage I have noted lately cause me great distress.First, the past tense is slowly disappearing. Actions of the past have been pushed with persistence into the present tense.It may be Ken Burns’s fault, because I first [...]

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As Winston Churchill said, the UK and America are two countries separated by a common language. Holiday Inn, of all places, has a guide to help you out.

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I’m so sick of the relatively new practice in which documentary films feature people talking about past events in the present tense. For example: “ER goes to India and is profoundly struck by the spirituality of the people.” That is stupid. End of story. And the problem is, it’s become all-pervasive—almost [...]

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