“Whom” is having a rough couple of centuries. The object pronoun beloved by fans of proper English seems to be less popular than ever. And I don’t just mean in casual speech. I mean in published ...

Decades after I began writing about language, there are still words I avoid out of fear I’ll use them wrong. And worse: Some of these are terms I’ve learned, written about, then promptly forgotten.

As NPR podcast hosts and language experts, we regularly hear people misusing words that seem alike but mean very different things. We call them "confusables" — because they are, well, confusing. These ...