Sometime in the 20 th century, shit—having already long been a verb and then a noun—also became an adjective, as in He was a shit teacher or That restaurant has shit service. Exactly when this ...

Before 2006, I never gave much thought to nominalizations — noun forms like “beauty” and “the scheduling” that at heart are really adjectives like “beautiful” or verbs like “to schedule.” I was ...

As a linguist, I’ve lost count of how many times I have been asked what I think of the various language-learning apps. The truth is that I don’t use them. But of late I have been watching my daughter, ...

‘The’ is the most commonly used word in English. ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet and is called a pangram. Most average adult English speakers ...