Words have weight.

When I first worked for newspapers and the Associated Press in New England in the 1970s, there was an interlude when accepted style was: “Ms. Smith (who prefers that designation)…” I’ve since told many disbelieving …

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Let us honor our words.

In his novel All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy whips up language like a wizard, and creates words so perfect that they should be engraved on a big pink-granite wall in a park devoted to …

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That word is in there. Somewhere.

That maddening sense of knowing a word but being unable to seize it, slip it into a sentence, and send it out into conversation has a suitably hard-to-remember term: Lethologica. This condition gets its name …

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Sad news: AP jargon gets the shove

(This appeared on an earlier blog.) As a former daily-newspaper journalist (and for a brief time many years ago, a proud writer for The Associated Press) I am heartsick to hear of the death of …

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