The word said has an elegant, indispensable simplicity. It's a mainstay of the journalist's art: "Five out of five editors find the noun form of the word 'overwhelm,' currently in vogue among the nation's life coaches, completely unacceptable," said Dr. Carla Ridge, founder of SSOUON (the Society to Stamp Out the Use of Overwhelm as a Noun). And in that context, exclusive use of "said" is appropriate and welcome.  Continue reading...

Two years ago, the International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto from planetary status, deciding that it was only a "dwarf planet." There was great uproar among fans of Pluto, even spawning a group calling themselves The Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet. The IAU held firm to its decision, though, and moved on to other nomenclatural issues. A term was needed to encompass Pluto and all Pluto-like objects on the fringes of the solar system out beyond Neptune. This week the IAU finally came up with an official term: plutoid. It's not the prettiest word, but it does the trick.  Continue reading...

Joshua Kendall, who we interview this week about his book The Man Who Made Lists, is captivated by the divine madness that drives lexicographers. He's following up his current biography of Peter Roget with a study of the similarly obsessive Noah Webster. We asked him for further reading on the fiery minds behind the masterpieces of word reference.  Continue reading...

Without Peter Mark Roget, there would be no Visual Thesaurus — or any modern thesaurus for that matter. We now take it for granted, but it took a special type of mind to come up with a system for organizing and classifying words and their meanings, in a way that also organizes human knowledge itself. Roget, a nineteenth-century polymath who wrote treatises on everything from physiology to slide rules, certainly had the mind for it. But he also had a deeply troubled personal life, surrounded by mental illness and heartbreaking tragedy. Joshua Kendall has written a fitting tribute to this fascinating figure in his new biography, The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus. We got to talk to Josh about the making of the book, and learned how his previous writing about psychology turned out to be an excellent preparation for exploring Roget's intricate mental world. Here is part one of our interview.  Continue reading...

GrokDotCom has compiled "The Ultimate Cheat Sheet" for writing online copy, with a whopping 101 links to helpful resources. Check out the whole treasure trove here and here.

Hillary Clinton suspended her presidential campaign over the weekend, allowing Barack Obama to claim the mantle of "presumptive nominee" for the Democratic Party. Of course, many in the media had already bestowed that title on Obama the previous Tuesday, after the vaunted "superdelegates" gave him an insurmountable lead in the delegate count. John McCain achieved the same feat on the Republican side back in early February when Mitt Romney pulled out of the race, though it took another month for Mike Huckabee to withdraw and seal the deal on McCain's "presumptive" status. It's a word we hear every election cycle, but Word Routes reader Courtney S. asks, where does it come from?  Continue reading...

In Japanese, dogs say wan wan, but in Greek they say gav gav. Onomatopoetic words for animal sounds can be surprisingly different from language to language.

Derek Abbott's Animal Noise Page

Quack-Project

Animal Sounds in Foreign Languages