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

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

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

Barack Obama's said some very nice things and he says them well. But if you ask me, the reason that we're looking at somebody who is such an inexperienced senator, who has said some very pleasant but not especially sterling or innovative things, the reason that he's considered such a big deal is simply because he's black.

I don't think that we really know a whole lot about Barack Obama at all that you would really call distinctive.

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

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.