LANGUAGE

There’s an art to creating emoticons from simple characters. Here are 16 characters you can borrow from the writing systems of other languages to up your emoticon game.

In a special collection at the University of Chicago, in a rare 1504 edition of Homer’s Odyssey, there are two pages—and only two pages—covered with notes in a strange language. As if that wasn’t strange and spooky enough, those pages are in Book 11, the

These –ty coinages have a slangy, modern ring to them, but English speakers have actually been trying to make –ty happen for centuries.

Montreal Expos broadcasters had to translate the lexicon of America's pastime into French.

Merriam-Webster announced that it was finally putting “Yooper” in the dictionary.

It turns out, there are a number of things about English that conspire to make “I could care less” a less irrational phrase than it might seem.

Here are five storytelling terms to store away for movie trivia night.

Leaving aside for now the few foreign loanwords (e.g., Qatar, Iraq) where Q shows up without a U, an English Q is the only letter that can't go anywhere without a partner. Why does a Q always need a U? We can blame it on a whole bunch of our alphabetic an

Every once in awhile, commenters hit on something I probably should have known, but for whatever reason didn’t. We are always learning. Or should be, at least.

If you like languages, you’ll love The Great Language Game. Data scientist Lars Yencken was inspired by his love of languages to create a simple game where you listen to a sample of a language, and then have to guess which language it is.

It has been two years since “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed as a military policy, but it seems to have taken up residence in our storehouse of ready-made expressions for good, which is not surprising, considering how succinctly it captures a particul