Mark Twain’s encounter with a particular foreign tongue inspired an essay called “The Awful German Language.” Welcome to a new feature of this column. We won’t call it “The Awful English Language.” ...

In French, to show that someone possesses something, you use their word for “of,” which is “de”: La plume de ma tante. Spanish works the same way: La venganza de Moctezuma. Italian, too: Buca di Beppo ...

SAXTONS RIVER, Vt. (AP) -- A strange series of disappearances is gripping the state, from Saxtons River in southeastern Vermont to Malletts Bay on Lake Champlain. And it's not just Vermont. In places ...

Martha Brockenbrough, the founder of National Grammar Day and the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, tells host Rachel Martin about what she has referred to as an "apostrophe catastrophe." The ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The Christian Science Church, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The Church publishes the Monitor ...

It was a modest proposal to ditch the humble apostrophe. Who’d’ve guessed it’d cause such a fuss? Not the officials in southwestern England whose idea it was to abolish the smudgy little punctuation ...

In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison established the Board on Geographic Names, which was responsible for ensuring and maintaining uniformity in all the place names of the United States. On September ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Sad news from the land of language. After 18 years of campaigning for proper punctuation, the fabulously named ...

I know a woman, let’s call her Ms. Mancini, who’s a bit of a grammar stickler. One year, Ms. Mancini and her husband got a very thoughtful Christmas gift: a carved wood placard to mount by the front ...