HeyJaredMore Mush from the Wimp
In 1980, the Boston Globe ran an editorial praising a position of President Jimmy Carter's. A skeptical staffer slapped on it a joke headline, "Mush from the Wimp," which somehow made it to print. Over the years, people have added the "More."
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
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- Sep 28, 2026
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- Jul 7, 2026
Latest issues
Communing with Great Souls (opens the original)
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The early part of my career was kind of a checkerboard. I started off with a staff editing job at a small magazine (The New Leader) for a couple of years, then hung out my shingle as a freelancer. This was in the late ‘70s, when the overhead and the barriers to entry weren’t as high as now, and the word-rates weren’t as low. (Plus I had an affordable sublet studio on East 23rd Street with a Murphy bed and an unobstructed view of the Chrysler Building.) After two and a half years, I’d accumulated
Director’s Cut: My Back Pages (opens the original)
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This was first published in Nieman Storyboard two years ago. Below, a director’s cut, created with the research assistance of AI, which has reared its head since I wrote the piece. It helped me pinpoint the additional sources and dates I mention in the footnotes.One day in the late 1960s, my father brought home a copy of Esquire magazine. Out popped a card offering an annual subscription for, I believe, $1.99. He filled it out and mailed it in, and subsequently the magazine, which was just a
Harriet Yagoda's Modern English Usage (opens the original)
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People who care about language usage (a surprisingly large population), are commonly labeled either “prescriptivists” or “descriptivists.” The former group says, “‘Disinterested’ means impartial, and it’s wrong to use it to mean ‘uninterested.’” The latter group says, “Hmm, it’s interesting that ‘disinterested’ has come to mean ‘uninterested.’”The terminology is a useful shorthand but it’s got a logical flaw: we (those who care about language usage) are all prescriptivists, and we are also all d
"Alongside" Ascendant (opens the original)
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The American-born University of Sussex linguist Lynne Murphy recently remarked on her blog (Separated by A Common Language): “A few months ago, an American friend of my spouse asked him to ask me: ‘Why is everyone suddenly saying alongside?’”That put the word on my radar, and within days I was asking the same question as Lynne’s friend. It seemed like I couldn’t avoid “alongside”! And a little research demonstrated that the two of us weren’t imagining th
Why Do People Keep Saying "Had Went"? (opens the original)
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About a week ago, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Zack Wheeler, annoyed that (for complicated and boring reasons) he wasn’t selected to play in the All-Star Game, said, “They could have did it a few different ways.” I have long been fascinated by this grammatical formulation, which, instead of using the past participle form of a verb (in this case “have done”), as standard English requires, uses the preterite or past tense (“have did”). I wrote about it back in 2018 as one of my last columns for L
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