“Scumbag,” sounds like the kind of hokey insult that would get you laughed at if you used it. When it was used in a New York Times, it got protests from some older readers, because once upon a time it ...

It can compliment, or dismiss. It sometimes conveys strong emotions, or no emotion at all. And that's "nice" -- a tidy, sturdy word that's remarkably adaptable. Hundreds of years ago, it meant someone ...

The latest original docu-series on Netflix has been mislabeled a “comedy.” “History of Swear Words,” a bite-size, six-part series about the evolution of some of the English language’s most notorious ...

Geoff Nunberg, the linguist contributor on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, is the author of the book The Years of Talking Dangerously. "My choice of words was not the best," Rush Limbaugh said in ...