We've come a long way from the days of Dickens and Clement C. Moore. Here are new classics in the Yuletide tradition.

Holidays on Ice

The Stupidest Angel

A Christmas Story

The Christmas Chronicles

Fred R. Shapiro, the editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, is constantly on the lookout for new quotations that might make the cut for the next edition of his authoritative (and entertaining) quotation dictionary. Below, find out what he thinks are the top ten quotations of 2008.  Continue reading...

How can students use the Visual Thesaurus to investigate chemical elements and their properties?  Continue reading...

I'm a big Langston Hughes fan; he had a gift for putting ideas into challenging yet embracing truths, and boy, was the man prolific. He wrote dozens of poems, plays, short stories and novels, many that are appropriate for a middle- and high-school-age classroom.  Continue reading...

My mention earlier this week of the word gerrymander (after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, blamed for the tortuous redistricting in his state in 1812) inspired some free association. One commenter posited a connection to the jerry of jerry-built ("shoddy; of inferior workmanship and materials"), though it turns out that word only shows up about half a century after Gerry first gerrymandered. Jerry-built, in turn, led another reader to wonder, "What about jerry-rigged? I've heard that it's really supposed to be jury-rigged."  Continue reading...

The trans-Atlantic words of the year have been selected on the Separated by a Common Language blog. Best American-to-British import is meh, and the best British-to-American import is vet (the verb). Read all about it here (and read our own discussion of meh here and vet here).