Why So Few English Words for Odors?

Another language shows it doesn’t have to be so

Zugzwang in the New Year

You can’t win—should you even try?

Spanish in the City

What’s behind an ongoing change to the Spanish spoken by New Yorkers?

The Powerless I

Can pronouns carry social meaning?

The Search for Meaning in Sound

On kerfuffles and hullabaloos and rethinking iconicity

The Disappearing Accent

For a while, youngsters stop noticing differences between dialects

Much Reading. Wow.

On the delicate dance between humor and inscrutability

Compendiums of Everything

A brief history of the modern encyclopedia

Headless Bear Walks Up to Woman; Awesomeness Ensues

The search for the perfect title

Quick: What’s the Past Tense of “Pet”?

On regular and irregular verbs

Magic Fingers

Do baby sign language courses really work?

What Makes Hemingway Hemingway?

On the psychology of artistic style

On Expecting Things to Fall Apart

We understand entropy surprisingly early in life

Limericks That Leave You Hanging

When we expect to hear a rhyme and don’t

Tuesdays with Siri

How to Talk Shakespeare

Headless Bear Walks Up to Woman; Awesomeness Ensues

The search for the perfect title

When Nouns Verb Oddly

Verb meanings are slipperier than noun meanings

Are Our Screams, Sighs, and Giggles Universal?

Two studies suggest yes and no

Don’t Mock the Monocle (A Webcomic)

On our unspoken preferences for ordering adjectives

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