FV: Annandale defines ‘definition’ as “an explanation of the signification of a term.” Yet Oxford, on the other hand, defines it as “a statement of the precise meaning of a word.” A small, perhaps negligible...

No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language’s capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be...

And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that,...