Questions about punctuation, pickleball, and pennies
April 12, 2025
Ben Duke, of Philadelphia, has sent me a photograph of the front of a store in Brierly Hall, England. The sign reads: Goodwyns Furniture Ltd.
Read “Lederer on Language” every other Saturday in the San Diego Union Tribune and on this site
Ben Duke, of Philadelphia, has sent me a photograph of the front of a store in Brierly Hall, England. The sign reads: Goodwyns Furniture Ltd.
These days, we hear and read a lot about battalions of government workers getting fired. The meaning of “fired” (“to discharge someone from a job”)
DEAR RICHARD: Thank you for giving me the bird in your recent column about our feathered friends. I just wish I could be your wing
The 2025 San Diego Bird Festival took wing on February 25 and will return to earth tomorrow, March 2. The annual Festival includes 150 programs
This coming Monday we celebrate Presidents’ Day, which honors the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, both born in February. On Presidents’ Day we
Ulysses S. Grant, our 18th president, entered the earthly stage as Hiram Ulysses Grant. When his name was mistakenly entered on the West Point register
One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher is receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay. The
Calendars were first made so that people could predict recurring events, such as planting and harvest times. In 45 BC, Julius Caesar ordered that the
The great English etymologist Owen Barfield once wrote, “Words may be made to disgorge the past that is bottled up inside of them, as coal
Welcome to the website woven for wordaholics, logolepts, and verbivores. Carnivores eat meat; herbivores eat plants and vegetables; verbivores devour words. If you are heels over head (as well as head over heels) in love with words, tarry here a while to graze or, perhaps, feast on the English language. Ours is the only language in which you drive in a parkway and park in a driveway and your nose can run and your feet can smell.