In his angry dissent to the court's decision on the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Scalia conveyed a specific kind of derision through his use of several colloquial expressions. He talked of the ...

You've known this English rule your entire life—and never heard of it before now. Can you find the error in the following sentence? “The bells chimed dong, dang ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Which made-up phrase sounds better to you: “sack sick” or “sick sack”? How about “make mock” or “mock make”? If ...

Chances are likely you’ve never heard of the term “ablaut reduplication.” It was new to me as well when a friend emailed a hard-to-read screenshot of a brief newspaper clipping. Being a word person, ...