An AI name, two -ANI names, a KitKat, and some poor naming choices.

Planet Word, a language museum housed in the restored Franklin School, opens this Thursday, October 22. Admission to the interactive exhibit space is free. The sound-and-touch activated exhibits aim to be both educational and entertaining, often with a social justice bent. Founder Ann Friedman is a former Montgomery County public school reading and writing teacher,

A rare manuscript version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, discovered by Dr. Leah Veronese, reveals how the poem was politically repurposed and set to music during the English Civil War. Dr Leah Veronese of Oxford University’s English Faculty has discovered a rare manuscript copy of Shakespeare’s Son

If Danish speakers experience hygge, then they should have a word to talk about it; if English speakers don’t, then we won’t.

Scots is one of Scotland’s native languages that, despite often being called a dialect, is officially recognised as a language by the Council of Europe and the Scottish and UK governments.

Located between Bielsko-Biała and Oświęcim, Wilamowice may seem like a regular southern Polish town lost somewhere in the hilly landscape of the Lesser Poland region. Yet to some, Wilamowice may be the most fascinating place on the map of Europe – the linguistic map of Europe, that is.

The gauntlet is thrown down, a new bar is set.

How we languaged this year.

I recently read The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail by Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen, as part of the Seattle Intellectual Book Club. The book counters various arguments against free speech, overall presenting the case that free speech should be protected in most cases except obviously damaging scenarios like defamation, fraud, or immediate physical harm. In this post, I reflect on the costs of speaking openly, especially in the age of cancel culture, where you might not run afoul of the law but can still lose your job or face intense online animosity.

In the final conversation of this series, we’ll confront a subject that the literary world likes to keep subtextual: money. The translators and

Translation demands a deep and scholarly knowledge of language, which never feels sufficient. Translators are often faced with the decision between making

Today’s conversation is another session of practical translation: the reading and comparing of many renditions of one passage to try and understand how

In 1999, twelve distinguished translators and writers—including Margaret Jull Costa, Seamus Heaney, and Tim Parks—gathered at a villa on Lake Como to

For reasons both aesthetic and historic, the English language can flatten the literature of other nations, while at the same time expanding its audience

Anyone who has been around kids knows that a good Lego build starts with a good base. In a translation, this is the first sentence. First sentences are a

In what is tantamount to a vulgar display of power, social media has been flooded with AI-generated images that mimic the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime. Something similar happens daily with tech writing, folks happily throwing context at LLMs and thinking they can vibe write outstanding docs out of them, perhaps even surpassing human writers. Well, it’s time to draw a line. Don’t let AI influencers studioghiblify your work as if it were a matter of processing text.

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?