The Oxford Dictionary selected “climate emergency” as its “word of the year.” Wordsmiths not grasping the difference between singular and plural surely indicate an emergency of some sort. So, too, does the growing propensity of words to describe the speaker…

Words tell us something about the speaker as well as about that spoken. The various “word of the year” choices tell us that the wordsmiths compiling dictionaries fixate on politics. The Oxford English Dictionary chose “toxic” for 2018. The OED…