Icome from a large extended family with a lot of engineers, and when I go home for holidays—aside from the usual queries about boyfriends and jobs—I’m generally asked a lot of questions about why I chose the majors I ended up with.

In my high school, the only teachers who spoke with accents were the foreign language teachers, as they were native speakers of French or Spanish. They had a slight accent but were otherwise fluent in English. At Wash. U., it is common to have non-native English speakers either as professors or teaching assistants. I remember [...]

New York Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire passed away this week. I did not begin reading The New York Times until after Safire retired his regular op-ed column, but he continued to contribute frequently to The Times through his “On Language” column and occasionally on the newspaper’s opinion blogs, and so I [...]