“Scumbag,” sounds like the kind of hokey insult that would get you laughed at if you used it. When it was used in a New York Times, it got protests from some older readers, because once upon a time it ...

"Good authors, too, who once knew better words, now only used four-letter words," Cole Porter observed in 1934. The four-letter words he had in mind were probably "damn" and "hell." Words that even ...

Geoff Nunberg, the linguist contributor on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, is the author of the book The Years of Talking Dangerously. "My choice of words was not the best," Rush Limbaugh said in ...

The College of Humanities is hosting a public forum to discuss offensive language and taboo subjects today at the Poetry Center. “”We’re going to have short talks, not do scholarly presentations,”” ...

How the hell do you write a #1 song? Don’t we all wish we knew the “secret” to that! Well, maybe there is a way to unravel some of the answer. Songwriting is an art. Songwriting is a craft. But is ...

Challenge from December 10: From Adam Cohen of Brooklyn, New York: Take the names of two birds, four letters each. Place these names side by side, then move the first letter of the string to the end ...