Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Standard English Conventions is one of two major question categories on the SAT Writing and Language section. When sitting for the ...

Language maven Charles Harrington Elster joins Host Larry Mantle to talk all about mispronounced words, from “arctic” to “zoology.” Elster is the author of The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations: ...

If you’ve spent the weekend enjoying a good book in the May sun, you might not have been thinking about mathematics. But if you were reading a book in a Western language, there’s a good chance that ...

A poet I know, reluctant to define what poetry can or can’t be, once suggested (somewhat facetiously) that a bag of dirt could be a poem if the poet deemed it so — calling to mind Marcel Duchamp’s ...

Some expressions are hard to punctuate. Take the phrase “How about that”; too sprightly for a plain ordinary . , it is sometimes too ironic to justify an ebullient ! . More often than not, isn’t it ...

Emoticons, irregular spellings and exclamation points in text messages aren't sloppy or a sign that written language is going down the tubes -- these 'textisms' help convey meaning and intent in the ...