What is "shtick lit"? Visual Thesaurus contributor Nancy Friedman defines it as "books perpetrated by people who undertook an unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it." Read all about the history of the gimmicky term at Nancy's entertaining blog, Fritinancy.

Jan Freeman, language columnist for the Boston Globe, has published a fascinating new book: an expanded edition of Write It Right, Ambrose Bierce's 1909 volume on English usage, "deciphered, appraised, and annotated for 21st-century readers." We caught up with Jan to ask how Bierce's century-old language peeves have held up, and what his work tells us about current usage struggles. Continue reading...

"Survival of the Fittest" is just one example of the many slam-dunk vocabulary activities that Janet Allen offers to teachers of all content areas in Inside Words: Tools for Teaching Academic Vocabulary. Check out how this activity could play out in the science classroom in our lesson plan, "Vocabulary Bursting With Energy." Continue reading...

As far as I know, no university has a Department of Nomenclature. I've never heard of an internship in brand naming. So what's an aspiring name developer — or even an inquiring civilian — to do? Continue reading...

The prestigious National Book Awards have been announced for 2009. The winners are:

Fiction: Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Nonfiction: T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon

Poetry: Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies

Young People's Literature: Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin

We welcome Ben H. Winters, who follows up the runaway success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with his own Jane Austen mashup, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. As the publisher, Quirk Books, explains, "Winters expands the original text of Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, swashbuckling pirates, and other seaworthy creatures." Hmm... octopi? Continue reading...