The choice of words is important when things like this happen,

Language doesn’t so much cause divisions as it symbolizes them. I don’t think using ‘evacuee’ or ‘refugee’ will change people’s minds, but it will signal differences about how we think about class that has always...

Everybody is using the ‘V word’ now. Basically, it’s become a way of saying our values are All-American, and you don’t have any … It will certainly appear at the [Republican] convention because Bush is...

[Only in the plural is a woman likely to be called a guy .] You can say, ‘Call Mary and Jane and see if those guys want to come to dinner tonight,’ … but you...

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These technologies are interesting in the same way that a shoe can also be a hammer. There are incidental uses for cell phones that often can be something that changes it altogether.

Cell phone makes those boundaries between public and private very porous. In the past, if you’re having a spat with a significant other in a public place, one of you will argue and say, ‘Not...

Culpable obtuseness. He should know better. That’s one reason why we don’t use the a-word, for example, of little children. They can merit the s-word, because there’s a malignity that’s innate in little kids sometimes,...

It’s not odd these days to hear politicians trumpeting their own authenticity, a claim that an earlier day would have considered self-cancelling. But when Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum say “I’m authentic,” they’re...