we can be pretty sure he wasn’t talking about his Facebook page. Instead, Fuller used the word to mean something like “estranged” or “fallen out,” a straightforward literal meaning that ...

Words sometimes have two meanings, as Led Zeppelin sang in “Stairway to Heaven.” And indeed they often do. Especially, words can acquire new meanings and lose old ones. For example, ...

If you’re using this phrase to mean “for all practical purposes,” then for all intents and purposes, you’re doing it wrong (see what we did there?). The phrase, “for all intensive ...

In fact, very few interesting words are quite so stable. As they are used, their meanings drift. Furthermore, they need not remain true to their etymological roots, a belief known to linguists as ...

We know that words change all the time and over time, a process language experts describe as “semantic shift,” semantics being the field of language concerned with meaning. Even if we may not ...

BABIES COME into the world seeking out comfort, so their first word is often “mama ... people listen out for “oki” and “aiata”, meaning “I’m getting out of here” and “stop ...