It's bright and early at #ACES2026, but we're up for the first session of the day: "Creating an Icon: The Making of the New Collegiate Dictionary" by @petersokolowski.bsky.social, @merriam-webster.com. #amediting #freelanceeditor #editorsky #language #dictionary #words #ACESDictionary

FYI, new (never released live) 1960 Oscar Peterson just dropped: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-eK...

I'm looking forward to #ACES2026 sessions by @rhiannonroot.bsky.social, @petersokolowski.bsky.social, @apstylebook.com, @gerrrib.bsky.social, @redpenrabbit.bsky.social, @meperl.bsky.social, and @methodicplum.bsky.social! carolinavonkampen.com/aces-2026-an... #amediting #freelanceeditor #edibuddies

Poles eat an average of 2.5 pączki per person on Fat Thursday!

I am broken-hearted at the terrible news that my alma mater, @hampshirecollege.bsky.social, after 56 yrs, is closing. Its death is a victory for conformism, for corporatism, for higher education's dull love of hierarchy & status. It's a grievous defeat for imagination & experimentation.

Hear hear

France Gall won Eurovision

And I'm sure some people will find this relatable: The candidate to be the creator of bitcoin "often confused 'it’s' and 'its.'"

🧵Thrilled to be a part of this wonderful celebration of Detroit jazz and delighted that Marcus Moore turned to so many of my friends and colleagues from the Motor City for the picks. If folks want to go deeper (and I know you do!) please check out ... www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/a...

Some great new deep-diving etymologies lately: "Another English variant, 'gabagool,' shows southern Italian laxing of voiceless stops and weakening or deletion of the final vowel (compare 'agita,' 'arugula,' 'goombah')." www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/c...

I once threw a Japanese novel out of the window because the translator thought there was a saxophonist called Lee Conitz.

Thrilled to be nominated for a Webby for Animation, for the shorts based on my language columns. Huge thanks to my brilliant Economist Video colleagues. We're up against the Death Star: help us beat Disney! Stick your vote right up the old exhaust port. vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting...

Middest. superl. of mid, middest, midst. Yet the stout fairy ’mongst the middest crowd, Thought all their glory vain in knightly view. Spenser. johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1773/middest...

For this year's Crossword Con on Fri. Apr. 10, I'll be giving a talk on "Adventures in Gridspotting" at 11:15 am ET. Come join us in person (or watch the livestream)! www.crosswordcon.com

Honest question: are there words that you need to look up every time you encounter them? Words that are at once familiar (you've seen before) but out-of-focus (they send you to the dictionary)? I bet all of us have one or two like this. For me one such word is 'militate.' What are yours?

I found a style guide for writing from the air force academy officer training program while cleaning out some folders. It’s decades old, encourages simple language, like not using “fatuous numbskull” when “jerk” will do

Yes. The hyphen in the phonetic transcription is the syllable break. The center dot in the respelling is the line break for typesetting.

The semantic overlap in the origins of 'heathen' and 'pagan':

mise en a Beemer

You wrote a novel using AI? Cool. It's like that time I ran a marathon using a Ford Focus.

Look, it’s simple. I have my copy of @korystamper.bsky.social ‘s new book and you don’t have yours. So I win.

Sat in a waiting room in Worcester for fifteen minutes and was just baptized in a deep well of Mass accents. So blessed.

🚨JOB KLAXON! The Winterthur Library is hiring a collections processor for the manuscript collection! secure10.saashr.com/ta/6002811.c...

I concur. A parallel hyphenation problem that I see way too often is with "all-time." The all-time-greatest editor is NOT the greatest editor of all-time, but the greatest editor of all time.

I see no use for a hyphen in "in depth" at the end of a senctence: The subject of an in-depth article was interviewed in depth. AP Stylebook, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage are silent, but Oxford's dictionaries enter the older, unhyphenated version. Recent usage trends toward hyphenation.

The idiom "easy as pie" should mean "you know, it would be much easier to just buy one"

Maundy-thursday. n.s. [derived by Spelman from mande, a hand-basket, in which the king was accustomed to give alms to the poor.] The Thursday before Good-friday. johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/Maundy-...

April Fool's hits different now, because we have learned that every day we cannot believe what we read or what we see with our own eyes.

And now another reason not to touch the stuff: the strong possibility that you will end up plagiarizing, whether you know it or not. But it was the "that is going to go away" attitude that rankled the most. That's the tech credo: anything that takes time or I don't understand must be obsolete.

In 2020, Paris allowed cafés to expand terraces into the street & parking spaces Then people realised that sitting chatting with pals while drinking beer is a much better use of the public space than storing a car there Now temporary terraces come back every summer (with some form-filling). Santé 🍻

For no reason other than fun. This is my profile’s banner image & it’s a photo I took from an inventory of a London church copied in the 1480s. The text is in Middle English & reads “olde ymages.” It’s a subject heading for a list of old sculptures kept in the church’s storage. I love it very much.

Happy book birthday to Kory Stamper's TRUE COLOR! (I got to talk to her a couple of weeks ago about this fabulous, fascinating book, and you can hear that conversation Thursday on the Grammar Girl podcast.)

A good size comparison between a hairy woodpecker (first, larger) and a downy woodpecker both eating at the feeder in succession, both black-and-white birds with similar markings and (in the males) a red patch on the back of the head. 🪶

A whole article on how to pronounce 'Thoreau': www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/b...

“Irregardless” is a word.

My friend last week the day he turned 100.

CEO refused to learn French though it is a statutory requirement for the position

À Milan, on prend le chocolat de Pâques très au sérieux 🤩 #marchesi #milano #lombardia #italia #photographie #photography

I honestly don't know why I never realized this.

My first job out of college was writing Gene Shalit's daily minute-and-a-half NBC Radio Network commentary. Great gig, amazing boss. He just had his 100th birthday, healthy and chipper and reading as voraciously as ever. Huzzah! From a book foreword I wrote in 2014, the passage celebrating him.

Anyone know someone who does family-history research professionally? I'm looking for someone to track down some people from the 1940s: expertise in UK/German post-war field. Please do cross-post.

Randle Cotgrave's 1611 French definition of the day: 'Desrobber. To steale, filch, pilfer, picke, nimme, purloine; slyly to lurch, privily to take, secretly to withdraw, from.'

Things would generally be better if our game shows were more like they were in the 70s.

don't tell Breisgau

Tracy Kidder had quite a literary presence in the Pioneer Valley , where I live. “House” is a great book about the building of a house in Amherst; “Home Town” is about Northampton; “Among Schoolchildren” tells of a classroom of kids in Holyoke. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/b...

(Insert rant about how "correct grammar" is often not a question of good usage but a matter of displaying the correct class signifier. I do not have the brains for that rant.)

For a little while there we were out of Miya Ando's beautiful book "Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Rain Words." But it's back in stock now, just in time for spring! mitpress.mit.edu/978026204986...