“What are you reading right now?” is one of the scariest questions an intellectual hot person can ask you. It's a question more loaded than a baked potato because there is a correct and incorrect answer to it.

Learning languages is hard, especially if you're not getting the whole immersion experience. I feel your pain for those of us who have spent hours in a classroom trying desperately to understand what the teacher is saying in French or Spanish . Some lucky people have caught the language-learning bug, whether it be through traveling, Duolingo, or even growing up in a multilingual household, and I love that for them. As a former college student with a linguistics minor, I loved how linguistics as…

Back in the mid-aughts, I was part of an exchange program that took a few lucky Americans on a trip to Japan for a few incredible weeks. It was a little nerve-wracking to think about traveling in a country where I couldn't read or speak the language, but to my surprise, it was incredibly easy to get around, and to ask for help (in English) with my timid voice. It seemed most people could speak English, and were excited to learn about where I was from in America. While there was anti-Bush graffi…

It's pretty common knowledge that English is far from the most logical of languages. I can't imagine how difficult it is to make sense of words like “their”, “there,” and “they're." Spelling may not be quite as difficult as Gaelic or Welsh, but making sense of silent letters must be frustrating.

It's easy to write something and never go back to edit it. After all, there are only so many hours in a day to get things done, and in many jobs, if you throw something onto the page, often nobody will clock your errors. No matter your job, it's usually a good idea to know how to spell, and if you don't, it's a good idea to have someone who can spell-check your work. Our brains aren't necessarily wired to pick up on spelling errors immediately, especially when we're reading something quickly. L…

I doubt that fish sticks, or (as the Brits refer to them) fish fingers are considered a delicacy anywhere in the world. The flaccid food reminds me of sad nights growing up with a mom who hated cooking. Paired with a glass of whole milk, fish sticks are the stuff of my epicurean nightmares. In some places, however, a fish finger is begging to be lovingly placed in a sandwich and enjoyed as comfort food. Okay, some places = England. While the United Kingdom may not be known for imaginative cuisi…

I'm sure we've all heard the same line over and over again from non-readers: “I just don't have time to read.” The fundamental misunderstanding they h

As a former English major, I feel like I can easily scope out a “fake fan” of literature. I don't care to do so on a regular basis because I have a life, but put a so-called bookworm in front of me and I can scope out their vibe easily in less than a minute.

When you're in high school, you have very little freedom. One of the few choices you can make for yourself is which trapper keeper you get from Staples. This is a critical decision, as that multiuse binder won't break for at least three years, so you better make the right choice. The question of “which binder color should I choose for which subject” was never one that phased me. I simply picked the binders with the prettiest colors and chose which subjects they were for based on ambiguous vibes…

British people get a lot of slack from Americans online. They get roasted for their teeth, food , and accents in ways that nearly always come off as hacky. Like we get it, Brits put peas and beans on foods that are largely incomprehensible to the Yankee mind and stomach, but can we let it rest? British culture through the American lens can lean somewhat limited. Personally, my primary outlets for learning about British culture have been heavily influenced by memes and internet pop culture: Harr…

They seemed to buy it too…

You've all heard the stories of English speakers getting tattoos of phrases in languages they don't speak. They try to get something inspirational or beautiful tattooed on an extremely visible body part only to discover later that what their tattoo really said was either something random or humiliating. Either way, it was not what they asked for. Although this is still happening today, this trend in the tattoo world was huge in the 90s and 2000s and will never fully go away. Although this pheno…

Language acquisition is not known to be quickly accomplishable or straightforward. Most of us spend four years in a high school classroom fruitlessly trying to learn French, Spanish, or German, to completely forget everything we've learned in the weeks after graduating. I even took three semesters of Russian language courses in college, which may or may not have been because my favorite comedian at the time was a fluent Russian-speaking drag queen. For monolingual divas like me, foreign languag…

Linguistic diversity is something that is not always praised in the workplace. Being bilingual is often seen as a boon for white-collar workers who know languages with reputations of being cosmopolitan or good to know for business. On the flip side, bilingual service workers tend to be perceived as being less intelligent when speaking in their native language.

Bear with me, but does one bear it all or bare it all? And speaking of bears, if a bear pays me a compliment, can I complement his compliment with a compliment? Or would that negatively affect the intended effect? The English language is full of cruel tricks. There are many examples of English words that have totally different meanings and yet are nearly the same, sometimes only distinguished by a single letter. Proofreader @chronicleflask recently tried to demystify the English language in an…

Very "funny"