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“King-size”: A bite-size history of an America-size word
On Halloween, there’s no disputing that the king-size candy bar is the crown jewel of trick-or-treating loot. But those extra ounces of chocolatey goodness don’t just measure our taste in sweets: The history of the adjective king-size also reveals America’s changing appetites and attitudes. The original king-size labeled a different vice: cigarettes. In 1939, the Read more.
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Book review: The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities by Paul Anthony Jones
He’s done it again. On the heels of his delightful Accidental Dictionary, Paul Anthony Jones—the word-grubbing mastermind behind the wildly popular @HaggardHawks online–is out with another collection of weird and wonderful words. This one’s called A Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities: A Yearbook of Forgotten Words (Elliott & Thompson, 2017). The publisher kindly sent me a Read more.
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Getting up to speed with Mashed Radish
A few updates are long overdue. Last Sunday, I had a piece in the UK’s Sunday Express defending the much and wrongly maligned like. Like, you know, like. As I argue: Like isn’t a sign that we’re dumbing down English. It’s a sign of just how, like, sophisticated our language is. Read more.
Mashed Radish 