Welcome back, friends! Last week I wrote about how we’ve inflated the word “extraordinary” until it means almost nothing. This week, I’ve been thinking about the opposite problem: words that have become too small, too casual, to carry the weight we actually need them to hold. Take “switch.” We use […]

Welcome back, friends! We call everything extraordinary now—a sandwich, a sunset, a Tuesday afternoon. The word comes from Latin: extra ordinem, “outside the usual order.” It was meant to describe things that break the pattern, that violate what we expect from the world. But we’ve inflated it until it’s lost […]

Welcome back, friends! February’s here, and I’ve been thinking about how the word “tense” does double duty in English. There’s tense as in tight, strained, pressured—the feeling in your shoulders before a difficult conversation. And there’s tense as in grammatical tense: past, present, future. What’s fascinating is how these two […]