Summer's not officially over, but now that Labor Day is past and the kids are off to school, it's a good time to look back at the latest batch of estival vocabulary. Back in June I made a case for skadoosh, a fanciful word from the movie Kung Fu Panda, as a candidate for Word of the Summer. And in an interview in July on Wisconsin Public Radio, I discussed some other summery words, from skinterns (scantily dressed Washington D.C. interns) to lawnmower beer (light refreshing beer brewed for easy consumption after a day of yardwork). But like it or not, the one new word that has trumped all others in the Summer of 2008 is staycation, the media-driven coinage for a stay-at-home vacation.  Continue reading...

Long before Twitter, writers have been trying to write fiction as tersely as possible.

The World's Shortest Stories

Micro Fiction

Flash Fiction

Sudden Fiction

Move over, Jane Austen. The Brontë sisters have a strong following in the blogosphere.

BrontëBlog

Brontë Parsonage Blog

Brontëana

Brussels Brontë Blog

A rare public appearance a few weeks ago by an obscure adjective got us thinking about how English deals with shapes. Here's what we found.  Continue reading...

Last time on Word Routes, we looked at a spelling error that's common enough to show up frequently in edited text: using acclimation when you mean acclamation. That's a case of battling homophones: the two words sound the same, but they have different meanings. The problem crops up with other sound-alikes, such as imminent vs. immanent, compliment vs. complement, principle vs. principal, and of course affect vs. effect. (We talked about that last pair recently in our interview with Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary.) These mix-ups are particularly insidious because your spellchecker won't bail you out — unless, perhaps, you are using a contextual spellchecker like the one that has been developed for Microsoft Office.

 Continue reading...

Rosina Lippi-Green is the author of English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. Now she has set up a companion website for the book, with observations on everything from Ebonics to double negatives.