Professional news writers are trained to economize their words. They do so as a sign of respect to the audience, as well as in the name of clarity. Why make people read more words than necessary? And ...

It’s a common phrase: difficult dilemma. But it’s also wrong — at least in the grammatical sense since a dilemma is, by definition, difficult. It’s what we call a redundant phrase, and they’re rampant ...

Despite the best efforts of William Safire, Edwin Newman, and John Simon (surely you've read all of their language-centric books), certain irksome phrases have somehow entered common parlance, like ...

A refereed publication, The Modern Language Journal is dedicated to promoting scholarly exchange among teachers and researchers of all modern foreign languages and English as a second language. This ...