It's time once again for the Scripps National Spelling Bee! The preliminaries are today, and the nationally televised semifinals and finals are tomorrow (May 31). Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer will be live-tweeting the competition tomorrow on the VT Twitter feed and reporting on the results here in his Word Routes column. In the meantime, read Ben's observations on tricky spelling here and here, and try the super-addictive Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee!

The podcast Lexicon Valley tackles knotty language issues in an engaging manner. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield finish a three-part series on language and gender by looking at the struggles over the absence of a gender-neutral pronoun in English. They talk to University of Michigan professor Anne Curzan about the case for singular "they" to fill the gap. Listen to the podcast here, and catch our own interview with Curzan here.

Last week, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum held an online panel discussion entitled "The Name Game," in conjunction with their exhibition of sculptures by John Chamberlain, who gave his works highly unusual titles. The panel was asked, what makes a "good" name from the perspective of art, marketing, or linguistics? What functions does a name or title fulfill? Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer took part.  Continue reading...

A holiday has been created out of thin air and promoted by a blogger named Shaun McCance: Passive Voice Day, to be celebrated by one and all today. Appreciation for the passive voice can be shown by using the hashtag #passivevoiceday on Twitter. As has been said by Shaun, "It's just enjoyed when things are taken to an absurd extreme." Attention has been paid from San Francisco to Australia. More can be read here.

The New Yorker asked its Twitter followers, if you could eliminate one word from the English language, what would it be? The most-tweeted suggestion turned out to be moist, a word that also bothers many Visual Thesaurus subscribers. Despite the mass aversion to moist, the editors declared another word the winner: slacks. Read all about it here.

The big news in the copy editing world this week was the revelation that the Associated Press Stylebook would no longer hold the line against the long-stigmatized use of "hopefully" as a sentence adverb to mean "It is hoped." The announcement elicited some strong reactions both pro and con. Here is a roundup of some of the online responses to the stylebook change.  Continue reading...

The latest issue of the literary magazine Lapham's Quarterly has as its theme "Means of Communication," and the closing piece, by VT editor Ben Zimmer, is a reconsideration of the thesaurus as a tool for modern writers. He finds many reasons to remain optimistic about the thesaurus as a reference work (and not just because of the Visual Thesaurus!). Read his piece here.