Month: January 2026
Who’s better at understanding written English — you or some random teen in South Korea?
Statistically speaking, as a reader of this blog, you are most likely a native speaker of English, so surely you must understand written English better than a random South Korean teen. Right? Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. A recent… Read More ›
Will the real John McWhorter please stand up? (No, no, that’s not the real one; that’s the AI John McWhorter!)
John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University who is both a professional linguist and a popular linguist. In other words, he writes both for his colleagues and for the general public. He also podcasts for the latter… Read More ›
Milkweed
After getting haircuts at SuperCuts, Barbara and I walked to the storefront right next door to it and ate brunch at Milkweed. What excellent geography we have here in Dorchester! Barbara had the traditional homemade house-made corned beef hash, which… Read More ›
They understand us across the pond.
Trump claims that the USA has regained the respect of everyone across the globe, but the Marsh Family knows the truth:
A note from Langston Hughes to my dad
Seventy years ago the great Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes penned this inscription in the front of my dad’s copy of Hughes’s A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. (Note that Hughes’s co-author, Milton Meltzer, added his own autograph… Read More ›
Enough is enuf.
This book would have made an excellent New Yorker article. But a whole book? Not so much. All right, I suppose many a New Yorker article does feel like an entire book — but Enough is Enuf by Gabe Henry… Read More ›
Is Modern Hebrew a conlang?
So I keep seeing references to posts on Reddit…and I always ignore them. But then I said to myself, “Why not give Reddit a chance? What’s there to lose?” That led me to sign up for a few subreddits in… Read More ›
Friends with words
Yes, you read that correctly: the title really is Friends with Words, not the more familiar phrase Words with Friends. And even the correct phrase, Friends with Words, has at least two meanings (think about it). If you yourself are… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 