Despite the obvious challenges, we went ahead and opened Planet Word in the “midst” of the COVID-19 pandemic. (I almost wrote “middle,” but that would imply that we had a…
In the lead-up to the U.S. presidential elections of 2020, it seemed like word usage and language were always in the news. What perfect timing for launching a museum of…
Can linguistics help predict a war? This past weekend, Planet Word Advisor James Pennebaker and his colleagues Ryan Boyd and Ashwini Ashokkumar posted a short article on their blog, Wordwatchers,…
Planet Word is located in the DMV — that’s the junction of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia — so we need to track what’s happening around us in…
A while ago I was invited to be a judge for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. My husband, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, had served a 9-year…
If you’ve been following the “word news” lately, you’ll know that the big issue of the last few weeks has been book banning. Wait a minute, you might be excused…