Joanna Bourne

I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm a language fuddyduddy, clinging to past-pull-date English. Language is a living thing. I don...

Came across this in Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs, in the heroine's viewpoint. A private detective is guarding a  client . He says o...

For those of you who want to be obscene but not heard. Or let your time travelling characters curse effectively while moving silently in a d...

Sometimes in the midst of a beautifully written story ⁠— in this case Coraline by Neil Gaiman — you find a little vibrating diamond of a ...

I have a little machine called a Eufy that glides around my floors and picks up dog hair and cat hair from underneath the chairs and the bed...

I came across, "He’d lost an exponential amount of blood," in a book recently. The weakening of the word "exponential" f...

 Learned a new word today:   viridian.   This is a bluish-green pigment consisting of hydrated chromium hydroxide or, simply, the color itse...

It is just hard to discover how con artists in the Regency period.  I'm fairly sure the current con games practiced in 1910 and in 20...

I put this together because the Penguin Audio people wanted to get the pronunciation right.  Or at least, get it the way the author wanted i...

Excellent commenter mst3kharris brought up the point -- I'm curious: Annique's name is being spelled as Anneka. Was the spelling ...

I was pondering verb tenses the other day. Thinking about the tenses we employ when we write in Past Tense, as we generally do. 'Past...

In the interest of providing useful bibliographies . . . here's a list of references for  words in use in the Regency Period for explici...

Reading here , The Lake Superior State University 2010 List of Banished Words. They dislike; tweet, app, friend as a verb, shovel-ready, to...

Let me say right off that this is a posting only for the linguistic and philological of heart. Discerning reader Annie posted this questio...