How Do You Spell 🏆

Jul 1, 2026

Roman Romance Novels Are Doing Something Strange to the English Language

The romance genre has always been a pressure cooker for language. Bodice-ripper prose, heaving chests, the kind of overwrought vocabulary that would make a copy editor weep into their red pen. But Roman romance novels — stories set in ancient Rome — are doing something weirder and more interesting than just recycling tired tropes. I remember picking up one of these books at an airport years ago and being stopped cold by a sentence that mixed contemporary American slang with Latin honorifics in the same breath. The character was basically talking like a woman from suburban Ohio who happened to be wearing a stola. This is the real story. Romance writers working in historical settings face a brutal choice between accuracy and accessibility. Go too authentic and you lose your reader in three pages. Go too modern and you break the spell entirely. Roman romance novels sit right in that impossible middle, which means the prose gets wild. Anachronisms pile up. Slang bleeds through the toga. And somehow readers accept it, even love it, because emotional truth beats historical precision every single time in genre fiction. The language stretches to cover the gap between then and now, and sometimes that stretch produces something genuinely strange, almost beautiful, a kind of

Jun 29, 2026

The Mooch Invokes DiMaggio and Nobody Knows What He Meant

Anthony Scaramucci quoted a Simon and Garfunkel lyric about Joe DiMaggio in a piece about America turning 250, and I guarantee half the people who read it had to stop and figure out what was actually being said. That gap — between a cultural reference firing in one brain and misfiring completely in another — is where English gets genuinely weird and a little dangerous. The phrase comes from 'Mrs. Robinson,' 1968. Paul Simon used DiMaggio as a stand-in for lost American dignity, a kind of shorthand for something clean and uncorrupted that had already gone missing. The words were never really about baseball. I once heard a room full of college graduates discuss that song and argue it was literally about a retired athlete who refused to do commercials. They were not wrong, exactly. That is the brutal beauty of English — the same sentence can carry two completely different freight loads and both arrive at the station technically on time. Scaramucci knew what he was doing. Whether his readers did is a separate mess entirely. Language is a bet you place on shared history, on the assumption that whoever is reading you grew up close enough to your own references that the words land instead of just