I hope you will care to enjoy my rich baritone contributions to the Extra Hot Great podcast’s ninth episode, “C’est Magnifique,” in which we discussed a plethora of topics, including but not limited to the …

I suspect that “pwaft” needs no definition, but I will let you supply your own in the comments section for a while and then formally update the entry.
Update: “Pwaft” is both a noun and a …

A very informative read, if somewhat discouraging (nearly every page contains a word or phrase I’ve misused for years), and if I had it to do again, I wouldn’t read it straight through; the book’s …

It’s naïve to expect anything in the way of nuanced criticism from The Brooklyn Paper, but the unlubricated Andy Rooneying to which it subjected Work of Art on the front page of the rag’s arts …

Our next book, by a hair, is Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting It Right. I tremble to think of all the words I’m about to find out I’ve been using …

The Anti-Word Of The Day is, as you have probably guessed, not a word or term I want to catch on, but rather one which I would like to drop headfirst into a vat of …

I coined “dorkasualty” just now, after giving myself a two-knuckle paper cut with the Chicago Manual. The 16.42 entry on documentation now looks like I used it as a hot-dog bun. Earlier today, I dropped …

I have a couple of questions about coffee — about the word “coffee,” the ways we use it, not about the beverage itself.
The first one: “coffee black.” I don’t order my coffee in the same …

On balance, an excellent read in spite of some frustrating overwriting.Plum-colored prose is a frequent fault of baseball books that I can tolerate at some times better than at others; here it’s bothersome because Verducci …

Baseball Tonight. No doubt they meant well, and what happened to Nick Adenhart is undeniably a tragic waste, but Thursday’s Very Special Episode seemed to me like cynical pandering.I can barely trust BT to tell …