Ideas | The Word

A golden age of proverbs

Though we think of proverbs as hoary old chestnuts, a new book argues that we’re minting new ones all the time.

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Dude, this headline is so meta

“Meta” has become a perfect meta-commentary on the consciously self-referential age we live in.

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Learn to speak Klingon!

A new collection of essays edited by Michael Adams explores the scope of invented languages.

Ideas | The Word

Taking back ‘Obamacare’

Can the president make an insult into a selling point? History suggests that political shorthands like these can sometimes be rehabilitated — but that it’s not always easy.

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The language of hoaxes

A really good hoax requires both strategy and tactics — luring the subjects in and getting them to believe something just at the edge of credulity, before springing the “gotcha.”

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How baseball gave us ‘jazz’

The surprising origins of a 100-year-old word.

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The QWERTY effect

How words make us feel is about more than meaning.

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Rise of the crossword robots

Computers vs. humans hits the next frontier as our brainy pastimes are falling, one by one, to silicon-based competitors.

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Write it like you’d say it

In a new book, “Vernacular Eloquence,” English professor Peter Elbow makes a case for letting how we speak inform how we write.

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The ‘meh’ generation

How an expression of apathy invaded America.