How ‘Close’ Is Your ‘Proximity’?

From The New Yorker to BuzzFeed, the Irksome Phrase Still Thrives After 150 Years of Redundancy

The warning echoes beneath the girdered ceiling of Boston’s South Station, and in the cramped bustle of New York’s Penn Station, on a TSA loop of repeating announcements: “Keep personal items in close proximity.”

Any prerecorded phrase, repeated often enough, can drive one mad. But that last two-word phrase is especially wretched.

“Close proximity” irks me viscerally, like chewing tinfoil. We are bombarded with it daily, not just by the TSA in train stations and airports, but also in the news, and even in literature.

For starters, it is redundant. Is …

By Murray Carpenter | November 23, 2016

Approaching 80, I Learned to Speak Millennial-ese

In Downtown L.A., I’ve Built a New Life at a Ripe Old Age

By Billie Greer | October 4, 2016

Ready for anything at the age of 78, I sold my home on the edge of Ventura County and moved into a downtown Los Angeles high-rise full of millennials and …

“Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania

Covertly Studying Language and Literature Connected Captives and Freed Their Minds

By Irina Dumitrescu | May 25, 2016

In a recent New York Times article on the movement to promote university majors promising higher employment and income, Anthony Carnevale, a professor at Georgetown University, sums up the utilitarian …

Juárez

By Brian Brodeur | November 21, 2015

for Jair Cortés

He said he suffered a strange affliction
for a parish priest: God dyslexia—
He only saw the hand of the divine
behind the drug-cartel dystopia
that had replaced …

Baltimore’s Refusal to Be Silent Was an American Triumph

Like the Youth of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, the Citizens Who Took to the Streets in April 2015 Roared Against Unfairness

by Tracy K. Smith | May 15, 2015

Four days after protests in Baltimore turned violent, I found myself looking into every black face I saw as I made my way through Pittsburgh International Airport, wanting to say …

Noah Webster Would Have Loved Urban Dictionary

The Founding Father of American English Was a Radical Who Wanted Us to Write the Language the Way We Spoke It

by Rosemarie Ostler | May 12, 2015

In the late 18th century, as the recently independent states were working to define what America was—after fighting with England about what it wasn’t—grammar books were still teaching American children …

language