John McWhorter
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Sebastian Scheiner / AP The Coronavirus Generation Will Use Language Differently
Being out of school for half a year could change children’s relationship with formal expression.
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Alex Brandon / AP The Surgeon General Meets the Language Police
Jerome Adams acknowledged the vulnerability of people of color—but ran afoul of a powerful ideology.
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Yana Paskova / Getty Images Bloomberg Flunks the Wokeness Test
Stop-and-frisk was awful. But to disqualify the former New York mayor from the presidency on that basis is to risk something more destructive: a second term for Trump.
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Bryan Woolston / Reuters Troops Is an Unethical Euphemism
A soldier is a person. A troop is something from the game of Risk.
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Carlo Allegri / Reuters Why Latinx Can’t Catch On
New words stick when they come from below, and respond to a real need.
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Scott Morgan / Reuters The Woke Attack on Pete Buttigieg
In The Root, Michael Harriot misreads the presidential candidate’s old comments on role models.
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Andrea Comas / Reuters The Show-Trial Rhetoric That Took Down a Charter-School Founder
A petition accusing Steven Wilson of “white supremacist” language makes no sense, and barely tries to.
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Carlo Allegri / Reuters Don’t Use the Word Emolument
It’s outdated. Why not use plain language instead?
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Erin Scott / Reuters Trump’s a Liddle’ Scary
The president’s linguistic life is as oral as that of a medieval artisan.
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Jose Luis Gonzalez / Reuters The F-Word Is Going the Way of Hell
In today’s world, slurs are the real profanity, not the use of an “F-bomb” to describe a mass shooting.
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Associated Press The Idea That Whites Can’t Refer to the N-Word
It’s long been accepted that the slur shouldn’t be used by white people to refer to black people. What about referring to the word itself?
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Brian Snyder / Reuters What Joe Biden’s Latest Gaffe Reveals
He equated being poor with being a person of color. But many people share that sociological assumption.
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Carlos Barria / Reuters Racist Is a Tough Little Word
The definition has grown and shifted over time.
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Warren K. Leffler / Library of Congress via ... The Origins of the ?Acting White’ Charge
School integration yielded a disturbing by-product: a psychological association between scholastic achievement and whiteness.
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Leah Millis / Reuters AOC’s Critics Are Pretending Not to Know How Language Works
A great deal of communication is based on metaphor.
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Associated Press The Astonishing Rise of Existential Threats
Have 2020 candidates been reading too much French philosophy?
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Isabel Pavia / Getty How I Taught My Kid to Read
Children can learn quickly by sounding out words, letter by letter—but somehow, the method is still controversial.
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Jessica B. Kirk / Shutterstock Don’t Scrap the Test, Help Black Kids Ace It
Commentary on New York’s elite high schools has focused wrongly on access over preparation.
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Tamara Shopsin Why Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little Kids
Embracing your inner child is comforting and fun—and just might revitalize the English language.
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Lucas Jackson / Reuters It Wasn’t ?Verbal Blackface.’ AOC Was Code-Switching.
Her critics are misreading the linguistic reality of America’s big cities.
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