That loud, nasal, and somewhat raspy air-suck sound you heard this afternoon was the noise made by the collectively inhaled breaths of nerds all over the planet Earth. The p.r.… 4 / Read more »

  On this date in 1828 Noah Webster copyrighted one of the most influential books in American history, some descendant of which most of us consult every day: An American… Read more »

In an 1888 letter to George Bainton, Mark Twain wrote that “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter — it is… Read more »

Shelf Awareness takes delight in the new book All In A Word by linguist Vivian Cook (who reminds us that, in the U.K. Vivian is a man, while Vivien is a woman):… 2 / Read more »

I’ve recently been having a lot of fun over at Savethewords.org, which is a site dedicated to resurrecting old words and thereby increasing your ‘word power’. It works by clicking… Read more »

This BBC story has reminded me why I refused to study linguistics in any shape or form while doing a modern languages degree. It may seem a counter-intuitive decision but… 4 / Read more »

The media attention to President Obama’s use of language may seem unprecedented, if only because his comparative eloquence follows eight years of an inarticulate and deliberately evasive administration. But George… Read more »

Oh my. As many as 2,500 languages are in danger of becoming extinct. Given that a person who can speak three or four languages is considered to be multilingual, it’s… Read more »

Inspired by Script & Scribble author Kitty Burns Florey’s now-famous attempt to diagram a sentence spoken by Sarah Palin, over at The Millions blog Garth Risk Hallberg decided “to see… Read more »

On the streets of Birmingham, England’s second-largest city, “the queen’s English is now the queens English.” According to an Associated Press wire story, the city has decided to ban apostrophes… Read more »