Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. You would think that, with all the words we have in our language, it would be perfectly natural to replace a word in an ...

“You shall know a word by the company it keeps,” are the words of J.R.Firth, who is said to have coined the terms ‘collocation’ and ‘collocability’ in 1950s. Ever since linguists and language teachers ...

A few days ago, I had an encounter with an old student of mine at a shopping mall. He said, “Sir, you taught us Technical English almost nine years ago. Though I don’t remember everything, there is ...