[I] would argue that native-born blacks are so vastly less "African" than actual Africans that calling ourselves 'African American' is not only illogical but almost disrespectful to African immigrants...
Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.
The difference between educated people and uneducated people is that educated people have been opened up to the notion that you can disagree without fighting; whereas uneducated people, in conversatio...
Stephen Jay Gould has told us that evolution is geared not toward progressive fitness but toward simply filling available ecological niches.
Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, i...
People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.
Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our concepti...
