In his letter to the editor, Jack Elder talked about the definition of the word “Dixie” (“‘Dixie’ isn’t racist,” July 26). We must remember the English language is a living, constantly changing thing.

Yes it does have a negative connotation especially when used with slave. Many people will roll their eyes and make it appear that the case of someone using the negative connotation of master/slave in ...

Guiding students to infer the meaning of a word from a set of images may be more powerful than providing a definition. Vocabulary is crucial to reading comprehension, but it can be hard to ...

Words have no intrinsic meaning. That is to say that the words don’t have meaning in and of themselves. Words are symbols of thoughts. We attach thoughts to words. The degree to which those ...

The human mind is astonishing. We can think through the toughest problems and find the smartest solutions. We can compute answers to the toughest mathematical questions. And we can apply our creative ...

Sparring between Attorney General William Barr and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse over the meaning and connotation of the word spying prompted people on Twitter to question the exact definition of the ...

Children learn language effortlessly and completely voluntarily. They learn new words miraculously fast. A teenager masters about 60,000 words of their mother tongue by the time they finish high ...

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...