How Words Shape the Way We Experience the World

I’ve always considered words to be beautiful — the way they’re used, the way they sound and the way they can be used to shape our experience of the world around us.
I started thinking about this more after reading a brief in Tuesday’s St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times mentioning a Mississippi State University survey that looked [...]

Making Up for a Loss for Words

Sometimes, the words we want to use to articulate a particular moment elude us. Other times, the right word is outside of our commonly-used vocabulary — or it just doesn’t exist. While at the Nieman narrative journalism conference in Boston earlier this year, for instance, I was talking with a Boston Globe reporter who said, [...]

Dude, What Does ‘Dude’ Mean?

I often think about words and how they relate to the way we express ourselves. Sometimes, we’re at a loss for words, either because we can’t find the words to articulate what we mean or because the word just doesn’t exist. Other times, we say a word but don’t really know what it means.
I’m thinking [...]