The esteemed British newsweekly The Economist has launched a new blog all about language and its relation to global politics and culture. Though the blog is newly hatched, its name is venerable: Johnson, after the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson.  Continue reading...

The New York Times Learning Network is offering students an alternative to the run-of-the-mill summer reading lists that are being stuffed into backpacks across the nation this time of year. The Learning Network's "Student Challenge" asks students to read The New York Times over the course of the summer and to identify something that either piques their interest or catches their eye. Bonus: the Learning Network plans on featuring the best student submissions on their blog!

Read more about the Student Challenge here.

As it did last year, The New York Times has tabulated the words that readers of the Times website click on the most to look up definitions. This year's leaders include inchoate, profligacy, sui generis, and austerity. Read all about it on the "After Deadline" blog here.

Word Routes, the regular column by Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer, was selected as one of the Top 100 Language Blogs of 2010, in a worldwide competition hosted by bab.la and Lexiophiles. Language blogs were nominated and then ranked according to user votes and other criteria. Check out the whole list here.

Thanks to Chatroulette, the ridiculously popular website that pairs random strangers around the world for webcam conversations, we have a new verb in English: to next. Two language-related blogs explain what it means.  Continue reading...

A new blog has been launched by Garson O'Toole, dedicated to unearthing the truth about the origins of famous quotations. If you want to find out whether Groucho Marx really said, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana," or if Mark Twain really said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," check out Quotation Investigator.