Latest articles by Arika Okrent
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Why do people say 'um'?
feature It's not because they're nervous
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21 creative TV edits of naughty movie lines
feature Movies feature a whole lot of language that can't be used on TV
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8 symbols that we turned into words
feature How / and ♥ became words in their own right
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Where did the phrase 'come out of the closet' come from?
feature This expression for revealing one's homosexuality may seem natural. But it's actually a relatively new thing.
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The Pig Latins of 11 other languages
feature English speakers aren't the only ones who can make a pseudo-language
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7 ways we could tell that AP tweet was a fake
feature Take out your red pens, folks
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Pop song titles are losing the love
feature In recent years, the percentage of music hits with love in the song title has been only 30 percent of what it was in 1980. Why?
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Bella, Cha Cha Man, Boogles, Fido, Mopsulus: Dog-naming trends through the ages
feature Forget naming your pup Max. Pets in the middle ages were named things like Zaphyro and Smylfeste
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7 words that came about from people getting them wrong
feature The word "pea" was originally "pease" and it was singular but confused for a plural
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Why the government should never, ever meddle with language
feature The fluidity of language is a testament to democratic values
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18 complicated scientific ideas explained simply
feature Using a custom-made text editor, scientists describe complicated ideas using only the 1,000 most frequently used words in English
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7 ways to be ready next time news breaks in Latin
feature If only you'd studied Latin, maybe you could have broken the story of Pope Benedict's resignation
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LISTEN: Singing the ABCs in 8 different languages
feature Not every country learns their ABCs to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"
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12 old words that survived by getting fossilized in idioms
feature "Sleight of hand" (not "slight of hand" as it's often misspelled) helped the Middle English word "sleight" survive obsolescence
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16 reasons why putting 'twerk' in the dictionary is no big deal
feature Miley Cyrus' twerking was awful. The word's inclusion in the dictionary? Not so much.
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22 songs that write themselves, from the Songwriter's Rhyming Dictionary
feature "Mildewy, St. Louis, chop suey" — it just needs a tune!
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What your Facebook updates say about your age
feature By analyzing Facebook posts, a new study uncovers which words best distinguish age groups from each other
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The first words of 11 famous people
feature You'll never guess whose first words were "Don't do that"
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Fun with The Great Language Game
feature How's your Tagalog?
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The world's greatest alphabet
feature Happy belated Hangul Day!
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12 things made collectible thanks to spelling errors
feature When "oops" turns into opportunity
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Is Faulkner's 'as I lay dying' grammatically incorrect?
feature Musician Sufjan Stevens has sparked a controversy with his open letter to Miley Cyrus
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6 creative uses of sentence diagramming
feature The architecture of sentences can be quite beautiful
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12 onomatopoeias from around the world
feature Chik chik pok pok is the sound of a train in Korean. Ghrutu ghrutu is pig grunting in Georgian. And more!
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