Do we still need dictionaries in the age of Google? That's the question posed by Julia Angwin in the Wall Street Journal's "Decoder" blog. Read her investigation here.

The anachronistic dictionary that showed up recently on "Mad Men" was just the tip of the iceberg. Linguist John McWhorter argues that the supposedly authentic TV drama doesn't really capture how Americans spoke in the early '60s. Read all about it on his New Republic blog.

"Double zeroes"? "Goose eggs"? "Diddly-squats"? Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters considers the tricky question of what we should call the current decade in his latest column for Good Magazine.

In the United Kingdom, the apostrophe is rapidly disappearing from street signs. But one man has decided to take matters into his own hands. Continue reading...

If you enjoy reading Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer's Word Routes column, you'll want to check out his appearance on Bloggingheads. Ben discusses many past Word Routes topics, from Ms. to jazz to Cronkiters, with his brother, science writer Carl Zimmer.

Fascinated by amalgamations like "green behind the ears"? How about "a wrench in the ointment" or "frothing at the bit"? Check out more of these idiom blends at Conflations: "Idiom conflation is a poetic art with a purpose."

Last Sunday, Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer filled in for William Safire's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, writing all about the word fail in its current use as a noun and interjection. Hear Ben talk more about the success of fail in an interview on the NPR show Future Tense.