One of my most enjoyable readings this summer was Anne Mäntynen’s dissertation ”How one talks about language”, because its observations apply so well to The Word of the Week. Her study deals with the rhetoric of language columns, and her source material consisted of 204 newspaper articles. The structure of such articles has remained surprisingly similar since the 1900s: they usually begin with an example and end with a recommendation. The article opens with a quotation or a reference, as well as a question. That opening often includes a loose reference to time –often, nowadays, a few years ago – or, nearly as often, connects some aspect of language to a current debate. The text itself proceeds from problem to solution, from question to answer, from specific to general, or vice versa. Writers describe good language with adjectives like short, clear, smooth, and bad language with words such as redundant, obscure, awkward. Mäntynen’s study insightfully illuminates how a writer builds expertise into his story. He appeals to authorities, shows that he knows them, and includes examples from his own work. The key authorities here are the Finnish Language Board and the Institute for the Languages of Finland in addition to dictionaries. The Finnish word for such language columns, pakina, could be translated as anecdote in English, though sometimes the only person who’d find them amusing would be another Finnish linguist.