Moonballs from Planet Earth

This blogpost started as an elegy for words from The Meaning of Liff  which are no longer relevant. Consider Kalami : The ancient Eastern ar...

Do we have an English word for a mother’s shadow, for her presence, for the comfort derived from a mother physically being there?  I don’t t...

Novak Djokovic in action The New Yorker about Novak Djokovic : "He was a McKinsey man, hitting his percentages. His approach wa...

Umwelt: this word deserves to be in more common use. It means "the world as it is experienced by a particular organism". It com...

Kolaveri Di has lived out fourteen out of its fifteen minutes of fame. So, one final thought to occupy that last minute: Kolaveri Di h...

English is the world's most successful language because it is so rich, it has many more words than any comparable language. Yet, frustr...

I had been in Istanbul for a couple of days, gamely drinking Turkish coffee to keep my clients company. Now, my soul craved the familiar com...

My flight had started boarding. I was gathering up my laptop, iPod, magazine and assorted paraphernalia to head to the gate when my cell pho...

"Are you having a Colombo moment?". I'd heard this question a few times at my new job, and I just couldn't figure out what...

One of the highlights of our family's trip to Paris this spring was this poster: It is prominently displayed all around the Paris metro ...

"That's wicked! Really wicked! Thank you man. Thank you. Wicked!" Thus spake a man-on-the-street. He wore workman's overal...

Gezellig : a useful new word to import into the English language. Or, more importantly, into Anglo-Saxon (or Tamil Brahmin) culture. Gezelli...

Management is justly famous for doing strange things to the English language. Consider: option value, hedge, synergy, self-actualization, ka...

Harper Collins is running a campaign to save rarely used words from oblivion. Heard about it on on Radio 4. They asking influential cultura...

My earlier post talked about English as the world's de facto lingua franca. Is this simply because America followed Britain as the worl...

An American friend observed at dinner last week that it is common for non-native English speakers, like maybe me and my wife, to speak with ...

Three residents of the Greek island Lesbos moved the courts to ban the rule of the word lesbian to describe gay women. Apparently, there o...

Much better than disembark. Found it in Isabel Allende's Zorro. Thought it was Allende's genius that had conjured up the elegant new...