What in the word?

In just a few days, “It’s gonna be May.” If you frequent social media, you have most likely seen this classic meme welcoming the start of May. The meme depicts…

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…