"I am not 'against' the word 'cis', or 'cisgender' – I employ it myself sometimes.
American food is — and here's a word I can use only with my fellow Americans, so I employ it with added vim — awesome.
I never touch the stuff by daylight if I can help it, and I employ it of an evening not to hooch up my faculties but to let them down after work.
Email was the only communication medium I felt brave enough to use, but I didn't want the very fact I'd employed it to be an excuse to reject me.
When I was a child, I was always allowed to stay home from school with even the flimsiest of maladies (had I known the word "neurasthenic" I would have employed it weekly) if I promised to sit quietly and read.
Since I am self employed, it means for the period I am sick, there is no money coming into the house to pay my "nkongole" (debts).
When I went to see "The Simpsons Movie" down at Battery Park one night, I used the light to help retrieve a quarter I'd dropped on the theatre's sticky floor; I've also employed it, hidden inside my jacket, to give myself an eerie glow when in the presence of small children.
I soon realized that if I want to remain gainfully employed, it might be worth imagining what being gainfully employed will mean in several decades.
Not that this is a bad thing — I certainly employ it frequently too — but I'm just curious why it has grown so popular… ADAM GOPNIK: Do I really — love the em dash I mean.
Whenever I use "impenetrable," for instance, I do so as a kind of private joke, since I associate it so closely with Joseph Conrad that I can employ it only as, so to speak, a secret sharer.
If there was an MO I would employ it all the time.
