Arika Okrent

From ink to calm, you might be surprised to learn how many words come back to scorching temperatures.

Punctuation can be a headache, even when it's just inside a name. Here are eight brand names with problems caused by those important little marks.

It might not be a big deal, but you can make it sound like one.

The story of American Sign Language goes back hundreds of years, to a time before America was even a nation.

Everybody hates management-speak and corporate jargon, but here are some terms that people used to think of as horrible jargon that we all got used to. Maybe one day we'll all be leveraging deliverables without a second thought.

Even if you speak French you may never have noticed them.

We know the umlaut as that heavy metal pair of scary looking Gothic-Viking-Teutonic dots, but it is so much more. Here is the story of the umlaut.

Germany. Deutschland, Allemagne, Niemcy, Saksa, Vokietija...