A news assistant  at The Boston Globe was working the phones. She took a call from someone looking for a particular reporter. “Oh, no, sir, he’s not in the office,” she said in a voice loud enough to be heard across the newsroom. “He only comes in spasmodically.” The newsroom politely stifled its laughter. We shared […]

In “Metropolis” (Random House, 2005), a novel about immigrants in late 19th-century New York, Elizabeth Gaffney has some fun with a recently arrived German’s problems following American English. In one passage, he’s at an employment agency when a clerk tells him: “Anyway, you’ve had your beauty sleep, and I think I can tell from looking […]