William Safire is surely known to Visual Thesaurus readers as the man behind "On Language," the weekly New York Times Magazine column that he has penned continuously since 1979. From 1973 to 2005 he was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for the Times, taking on the persona of a "vituperative right-wing scandalmonger," in his own self-deprecating terms. But since retiring from the Op/Ed page, his "word maven" persona is now ascendant, particularly with the latest edition of Safire's Political Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2008), a book that Newsweek has hailed as "the definitive work on the subject."

Does Art imitate Life? When the written word is involved it's not always easy to tell. This month in the Lounge, we examine the curious phenomenon of English word patterns that seem to occur mainly in fiction writing.

Ben Zimmer, like most lexicographers we meet, has a fascinating a background: A self-described "dictionary hound" as a kid, he volunteered in college as a "reader" for the Oxford English Dictionary, scanning music magazines for new terminology. He then worked as a linguistic anthropologist researching the languages of Indonesia before returning to his lexicographic roots. Long discussions with the OED editors about emerging technology led ultimately to his current job, as Editor for American Dictionaries at Oxford. It's a job where he's intimately involved with the Oxford English Corpus, a high-tech infrastructure for writing dictionaries. Ben graciously spoke to us about his work:

Frescata? Bananarcalepsy? Dreadhawk? Any of these ring a bell? They're all entries in a fascinating online project to document "false words" called Fauxlogism. Check out their entire list.

We asked Bob Greenman, the author and educator we interview in this week's "Teachers at Work" feature, to recommend books about vocabulary. Here are his picks:

America in So Many Words, by Allan A. Metcalf and David K. Barnhart. "Year by year, the stories behind significant American words like cookie (1703), squatter (1788), hobo (1847), bathtub (1870), muckraker (1906), jukebox (1939), duh ( 1963) and newbie (1993)."

When Bob Greenman taught high school journalism and English in Brooklyn, NY, public schools he found himself turning to the New York Times for more than just the news. "I had the kids work on vocabulary from the paper," the 30-year veteran educator explains. "It's peerless for vocabulary acquisition, even better than reading classic fiction." That experience inspired Bob to put together a book called Words That Make a Difference, a compendium of vocabulary words with contextual examples from the New York Times, and another one he co-authored with his wife Carol, this time with examples from the Atlantic Monthly magazine. We spoke to Bob about his practical approach to teaching vocabulary.