As the new American Football season hits its stride, the city's beloved team, The Redskins, is being taken to the Supreme Court over its allegedly-offensive name.

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The main syntactic problem is to determine whether the @!$%# is being used as an pleonastic (semantically empty) direct object of shut or as a pre-head modifier of the preposition phrase (PP) headed by up. (Yes, the up of shut up is a one-word PP.

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The Death of the Obvious

The above phrase has been echoing through my brain for several months now. It's sort of become my mantra for everything in the media -- the Death of the Obvious.

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Google has now added a "searches relate to:" selection at the bottom of a search's results page. These are, in effect, searches that relate keywords in a query to completely different keywords that have a semantic connection. More Articles

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When you hear the word "planet," do you automatically think of the word's literal definition, or of other words, such as "Earth," "space," "Mars," etc.? Especially when used in sentences, words tend to conjure up similar words automatically.

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Not everyone is that upset about the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration.

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Roy Blount Jr. has returned from the fields where the American lingo grows wild to write "Alphabet Juice," his personal lexicon, usage manual, writers' guidebook, etymological investigation and literary junk drawer.

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The Supreme Court specializes in law, not lexicography. But it will soon have to consider the meaning of that most versatile of four-letter words.

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Until 1991 the word 'subprime' meant something eminently desirable and worthy of aspiration. But it has suffered a surprising and unusually rapid evolution.

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It's a matter of mere "semantics," as we say, with its implication of picking nits, splitting hairs, and debating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

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Nobody really knows what socialism is, they just define everything ungood as socialism.

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Osama bin Laden is a terrorist. The Bali bombers are terrorists. We are all quick to make statements such as these and, in those two instances, it is easy to do. But rarely do we stop and consider what we mean by "terrorism", and it can be very difficult to draw the line.

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Can authors be their own editors?

A recent AdAge article about WSJ staffing changes brings up a major question for writers and editors.

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Microsoft's acquisition of Powerset signals a the building of a future when the entire world will likely have access to virtual "software agents" who will "roam" across the Web, making our travel arrangements, doctor's appointments and basically taking care of all the day …

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SemanticMatch announced the launch of next-gen online ad targeting. Peer39 "matches ads to content by processing natural language, meaning and sentiment on websites" (Marketing Vox, 6.27.08).

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IMAGINE if Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken to calling Adolf Hitler the "leader of the National Socialist Aryan patriots" or dubbed Japanese soldiers fighting in World War II as the "defenders of Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere."

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Logic, Where Art Thou?

I have a confession to make. I love information. I like to know things. Really, there's little better than informed, and informing, discussion and debate.

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Some residents on the Greek island of Lesvos say they are the only true Lesbians and they want gay groups to stop using the word.

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I have no idea whether Johnson has a personal animus against Romney; he certainly has a career interest in scandal, because then he can write about it.

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Like old clothes, the language of the old Cold War is comfortable, but not presentable. The "West" is not western. "Eastern" Europe is no longer eastern; central Europe is no longer central.

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There are too many weasel words sucking the life out of the English language...

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1. Coffee (n.) the person upon whom one coughs. 2. Flabbergasted (adj.) appalled over how much weight you have gained. 3. Abdicate (v.) to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. 4. Esplanade (v.) to attempt an explanation while drunk. 5.

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In 2006 there appeared a "raise the minimum wage" statement signed by 659 economists. I wanted to know why they favored the minimum wage, so I wrote up a questionnaire and sent it to them.

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When I see someone insisting that "antisemitism" must, must, must also mean anti-Arab bigotry, based on its word roots, I reply that by similar reasoning "October" must, must, must mean the eighth month of the year and "December" the tenth.

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W3C. Valid XHTML. Valid CSS2.

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