A reader asks, Is there any difference between the adjectives educational and educative? I’m beginning to see the latter in contexts where I’d expect the former. My first response to the question was that educative is simply a less familiar word for educational. Both the OED and Merriam-Webster indicate that this is so: OED educational … Read more
While looking stuff up, I became curious about how many words include the unusual pairing of m and n, and I discovered more than I had expected. Many more than twenty exist, but I’ve listed only that number (along with their definitions), choosing to exclude several categories of words. (See below for details.) Words ultimately … Read more
Recently, this text for an online ad caught my attention: “All she asked for was a hand-up, not a hand out.” What struck me was that the copywriter, though I give him or her credit for a clever turn of phrase that pivots on the contrast in meaning between two idioms starting with the root … Read more
At first glance, readers unfamiliar with the word fatuous might assume that it has something to do with obesity. The term, however, derives from the Latin word fatuus, meaning “silly” or “stupid.” It may stem ultimately from a word meaning “of speech,” with the implication that a fatuous person is one notorious for saying silly … Read more
The selection of -ism as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year should be invalidated on a technicality—the dictionary publisher might choose, instead, to refer to the Morpheme of the Year—but the choice is an apt one, as multiple concepts whose names include that suffix have dominated recent public discourse. Merriam-Webster selects the Word of the Year … Read more
A reader questions my use of the phrase “myself included” in the following extract from a post on who versus that: Many speakers, myself included, feel that who is usually the first choice when the antecedent is human, but recognize that its use is a stylistic choice and not a matter of rule. Sometimes that … Read more
A writer at Business Insider begins his report on Merriam-Webster’s “word of the year” by saying, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is actually a suffix: -ism. Actually, ism has been used as a noun in English since 1680, when a critic referred to Milton as “the great Hieroglyphick of Jesuitism, Puritanism, Quaquerism, and of all Isms … Read more