From TED, aphorism enthusiast and author James Geary waxes on a fascinating fixture of human language: the metaphor. Anatoly Liberman on the dubious history of pun (pun among other pungent words). If God is dead, then f*ck is the most important word in English. Here are 6 slang terms with surprisingly badass origins. An excerpt from Anonyponymous: The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words by John Bemelmans Marciano. More and more on The Lexicographer's Dilemma by Jack Lynch. Sweet tooth fairies: Erin McKean on the rise of a language mashup. Mark Peters on the language of The Big Lebowski. The curious case of the evolving apostrophe: A new technique for analyzing early English texts is gradually revealing the history of the apostrophe. Take the question and exclamation marks often found together at the end of shock-transmitting sentences (“You won how much money at poker?!”) and merge them into a single typographical symbol, the “interrobang”. Do we need a new punctuation mark? Yes, an it’s called the SarcMark. How to invent a word: How hard can it be to break into the dictionary? Comedian Alex Horne recounts his long journey to linguistic immortality. A review of Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. A review of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler. Is your English up to scratch? Six books that explain the rules and illuminate the idiosyncrasies of an ever-changing tongue. The Keypad Solution: Is text messaging reforming the spelling of English? Children who regularly use the abbreviated language of text messages are actually improving their ability to spell correctly, research suggests. Clive Thompson reviews Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World by Naomi Baron and Txtng: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal.
