We often hear fascinating stories about how things originated: the universe, the wheel, even pizza. But when it comes to the words we toss around every single day without a second thought, it’s wild ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...

To a recent roundup of whale shark news, I appended a sort of human interest one-liner about how “shark” is the only word in the English language that derives from a Yucatec (Mayan) Indian word – “Xoc ...