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Word lovers, listen up: Grant Barrett, creator of the Double-Tongued Word Wrester's Dictionary and a lexicographer at the Oxford University Press, recommends these blogs on language:
Separated by a Common Language. Lynne Murphy is an American linguist working and living in the U.K.
She writes about variations between British and American English.
Language Log. One of the smartest group blogs on any topic anywhere on the Anglophone Internet, featuring respected linguists and grammarians commenting on the mundane, arcane, and profane. A key to the blog's success is that the various posters disagree as often as they agree? meaning more than one school of thought is represented, rather than whatever is faddish or fashionable.
Verbatim, the Language Quarterly. A neat and nifty newsletter with fun, funny, and quirky articles from a variety of authors. Edited by my Oxford University Press colleague Erin McKean.
Click here to read more articles from Blog Du Jour.
There's an anonymous Spanish folk song called "La hija de Juan Simon" about a gravedigger who has to bury his daughter. In the version I have, the song is sung by the legendary Juanito Valderrama. The song gave me goose bumps, and I told myself that one day I would write the story of that gravedigger. Since then, I've played the song over and over, probably a thousand times, and I still get goose bumps every time.
A few years later, while attending the low-residency MFA program at Bennington College, I was having coffee with my teacher, the writer Elizabeth Cox, and she asked me about my relationship with my three-year-old daughter, Elena, (my second being just a baby at the time). I began to tell her the story of how each night as I tucked Elena into bed I would tell her a story. Only before I finished nearly every line, Elena would interrupt me, saying, "No, Daddy, that's not how it goes. It goes like this." And then she would proceed to send the story in a new direction. Like a good father, I would adapt and attempt to take the story in that direction but after another line she would interrupt me again and do the same thing. I was in the process of telling Elizabeth that this would go on for as long as I told the story, when she looked at me and said, "I think you have a story in there."
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Click here to read more articles from Backstory.
Last month we excerpted a blog entry from Away With Words, professional name developer Nancy Friedman's website on naming and copywriting. We had to revisit her when we read a recent entry titled "What Not to Name the Baby." Nancy says "naming a baby is not all that different from naming middleware, perfume or a venture capital firm." Why? Read the entry here.
Click here to read more articles from Blog Excerpts.
What books should your kids read? Just ask Betsy Bird. As a senior librarian at The New York Public Library's Donnell Central Children's Reading Room, she talks to parents and kids of all stripes about great reads. When she's not at the library, she's blogging on A Fuse #8 Production, her popular website dedicated to children's literature. And when she's not blogging, she's on the radio, talking about kids' books on NPR. All this as "a mere slip of a 28-year-old." We called Betsy for a book-filled conversation about children's lit:
VT: Do you still remember the books you read as a kid?
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Click here to read more articles from Teachers at Work.
Betsy Bird, the remarkable and passionate children's librarian we spoke to this week about great children's books, tracks the latest kid's literature at her job, and on her blog, the well-thumbed (virtually speaking) A Fuse #8 Production. Here are fifty or so of her favorites published this year. She reads them all, so she knows!
Picture Books:
Click here to read more articles from Dog Eared.
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, is living a word lover's dream: By day he's a lexicographer and project editor at the Oxford University Press's "Historical Dictionary of American Slang," and by night he runs the 
by Jonathan Allen
by Suzy Becker
by Lauren Child 
by Kelly Cunnane
