No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.

English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.

We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.

Politics is work. Hiphop is music. The idea that hiphop, because it makes the body feel good to move to it and it makes the soul feel good to hear out angry young black men, can be transmuted into changing the world is narcotic but nonsensical. Wherever hiphop is ever "going," we can be sure it will not be in a constructive direction, anymore than fashions in the color of cars. And it shouldn't "concern" us in the least.