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''Eureka!'' That was the cry of the New York Times executive editor A. M. Rosenthal in early 1979, when he hit upon an idea for a new column to run [...]

In my previous reader response, I mentioned the puzzling proverb ''You can't have your cake and eat it too.'' Matthew Parry writes: ''I'd always found 'have your cake and eat [...]

Rest in peace,smashmouth. Ten years ago in this space, William Safire noted that the football term smashmouth had become ubiquitous, thanks in part to the debut of the XFL, the [...]

Pity poor Hannah, who received a startling text message on her cellphone, sent from her father: ''Your mom and I are going to divorce next month.'' After Hannah registered her [...]

Keith Otis Edwards e-mails: ''In the Dec. 12 On Language column, I see that hackneyed phrase treasure trove. Since a trove is defined as 'a store of valuable or delightful [...]

I'll soon be headed to Pittsburgh for the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, where my colleagues and I will engage in discussions about the country's diverse linguistic forms. [...]

CORRECTION APPENDED Mark Scheerer writes in response to my column on the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web: ''Tim Berners-Lee says his friends gave him a hard time because [...]

''My Fair Lady'' had ''The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.'' ''Singin' in the Rain'' had ''Moses supposes his toeses are roses.'' To cinema's pantheon of tricky diction, [...]

Andrew Marc Greene e-mails: ''My son's fourth-grade class was debating whether paper on which one scribbles offhand notes is scrap paper or scratch paper. Scrap paper describes where it comes [...]

In 2010, we lost four towering figures in the world of words. They all shared a deep and abiding love of the English language, though they expressed that love in [...]

Allan Curry writes: ''What's to account for the ubiquity of the word resonate, once largely confined to the concert hall, now more (and more) often used to suggest receptivity (to [...]

The origins of our Webified age were hardly auspicious. Two decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory outside Geneva, was sketching out a global [...]

In my recent column on Stephen Colbert's coinage of ''truthiness,'' I wrote that the title of Charles Seife's new book, ''Proofiness,'' is ''very much a homage to Colbert.'' Laura Kozin [...]

When Liana Roux, a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was reading a Facebook event page for her friend's birthday party recently, she noticed a terse [...]

Around 4 p.m. on Oct. 17, 2005, Stephen Colbert was searching for a word. Not just any word, but one that would fit the blowhard persona that he was presenting [...]

Theodore Rockwell, who served as technical director for the U.S. Navy's nuclear-propulsion program in the 1950s and '60s, shared a telling anecdote about his onetime boss, the famously irascible Adm. [...]

Randy Britton e-mails: ''I've noticed in much of the coverage of the BP oil spill that the press has taken to calling the oil well 'busted.' Since when is 'busted' [...]

My ebullient 4-year-old son, Blake, is a big fan of the CDs and DVDs that the band They Might Be Giants recently produced for the kiddie market. He'll gleefully sing [...]

Jan Conaway writes: ''The first time I heard someone say 'All's I know is . . .' was in the 1980s. As I'm sure you have noticed, this annoying expression [...]

The New York Mets lost their closer Francisco Rodriguez, a k a K-Rod, to season-ending surgery on a torn thumb ligament last month. But really the Mets lost him to [...]

Commenting on my column about beach lingo from the Jersey Shore and elsewhere, Gary Muldoon writes: ''If someone from the Garden State comes from 'Jersey,' do those residents refer to [...]

When is aleak not a leak? Last month's release of the Afghan war logs -- tens of thousands of classified documents unveiled by the Web site WikiLeaks -- stretched the [...]

Jane E. Wohl writes: ''I have noticed among my students a growing use of the word 'relatable,' as in 'I like Sarah Palin. She's relatable' (meaning, 'I can relate to [...]

When Jake Tapper of ABC's ''This Week'' asked Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey last month for his opinion of the MTV reality series ''Jersey Shore,'' the contempt in the [...]

In my recent column on the expression ''rock the mic,'' I wrote that ''the M.C.'s of early hip-hop took the verb [rock] in a new direction, transforming the microphone (abbreviated [...]

Neale Gifford writes: ''One practice that annoys me is the use of 'one-year anniversary' or 'five-year anniversary' instead of 'first' or 'fifth.' Reason? Anniversary is derived from the Latin annus [...]

Talk about a culture clash. Last month I found myself playing snippets of old-school hip-hop over tinny laptop speakers for a roomful of lexicographers at Oxford University. The occasion was [...]

Donn Barclay e-mails: ''I have been hearing and reading the phrase 'one-off' more and more lately. It seems to me that it is a serious bastardization of 'one-of,' as in [...]

Ben Zimmer answers selected reader questions sent to onlanguage@nytimes.com. The spelling of English is a bizarre mishmash, no doubt about it. Why do we spell acclimation with an ''i'' in [...]

In my recent column on cool, I wrote, ''From Old English to the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare all the way to the present, cool has been able to mean [...]

If you use Facebook much, you know the drill. You log on for your social-networking fix, and the site looks different from how you remembered it, either subtly or radically [...]

Lynne Geyser writes: ''My son and I are in disagreement concerning the use of the word revert. The only usage I find acceptable is 'to return to a previous state.' [...]

The Times Literary Supplement, the erudite British weekly, isn't the first place you would expect to find an outbreak of cool. But for a recent stretch of a few months, [...]

W.F. Young asks: ''Long ago I developed the expectation that on encountering the word fraught, I'd find it associated with a prepositional phrase, 'with [something].' Now, in old age, I [...]

For the uninitiated, financial writing can sometimes sound like science fiction. Take this sentence from ''The Quants,'' a new book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson: ''To the [...]

Ashley Mergen asks: ''What is the proper plural of e-mail? When referring to snail mail, you would not say, 'I received a hundred mails,' but rather, 'I received a hundred [...]

When Keds kicked off a retro advertising campaign in March as ''the original sneaker,'' the venerable brand tripped over its own laces. Claiming that ''Keds are the first shoes to [...]

''Wellness,'' intoned Dan Rather in November 1979, introducing a ''60 Minutes'' segment on a new health movement known by that name. ''There's a word you don't hear every day.'' More [...]

In our Web-driven era of social media and social networking, we are all learning more sophisticated ways to ''socialize'' that go far beyond cocktail-party chatter. But being social in the [...]

Two of the most basic words in the English language, yes and no, are locked in a constant struggle, embodying abstract forces of agreement and opposition, positivity and negativity, acceptance [...]

When President Obama responded to the failed Christmas airliner bombing while on vacation in his native state of Hawaii, some Republicans claimed it was ''bad optics.'' ''Hawaii to many Americans [...]

Here's one safe prediction for the Winter Olympics: Competitors and commentators will use podium as a verb, as in, ''She can definitely podium here today.'' And just as predictably, some [...]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. ''You sometimes make a [...]

If you're a lawyer presenting an oral argument before Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, never, ever use the word choate. No, not the name Choate (rhymes with ''boat''), [...]

When James Cameron's science-fiction opus ''Avatar'' comes to the screen this month, audiences will witness meticulously conceived alien characters -- speaking a meticulously conceived alien language. To lend extra authenticity [...]

The Cadillac division of General Motors has seen better days, with woeful sales figures even compared with those of other brands in the slumping luxury-car market. Yet the name Cadillac [...]

In the Nov. 10, 1901, edition of The Sunday Republican of Springfield, Mass., tucked away in an item at the bottom of Page 4, an unnamed writer put forth a [...]

''How do you do. This is a new column about language.'' So began William Safire's inaugural On Language column on Feb. 18, 1979, which promised to explore ''new words, vogue [...]

''What's done cannot be undone,'' moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalking scene. If she woke up in the 21st century, she would be pleased to discover that whatever can [...]

Spend some time on the Internet, and you'll start to see a peculiar usage of the word fail popping up everywhere. A conservative blog posts an image of a United [...]