You’ve probably seen it by now, even if you didn’t have a word for it. The bland, over-explained, faintly robotic paragraph that says everything and nothing. The email that opens with “I hope this message finds you well” and never recovers. People have started calling this stuff slop: text that’s […]

Most people think of words as labels. A chair is a chair. A story is a story. Vision means seeing. Provision means supplies. But once you begin studying etymology, you discover something strange. Words are not labels. They are fossils. Each one preserves a little piece of how our ancestors […]

Today I will talk about politics and the English language again, but from a drastically different perspective. I live in Malaysia, where the language you use is the subject of constant political discussion – Wherever you go on the Malaysian internet, it seems that people want you to not speak […]

One of my favorite pieces in the world is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” You can find it here. It reveals something very interesting that I’ve often thought about: the language we use reveals the clarity of our thought. In other words, the less clear your writing is, […]