In Japan, the new craze among ESL students is learning English from the speeches of Barack Obama. The Wall Street Journal reports.

I've given birth to two children by scheduled Cesarean section, so I never had to spend a moment in actual labor. Is it true that many women forget the painful hours they spent in natural childbirth? I read somewhere that nature created some mechanism in us by which women do, indeed, forget so that we'll be willing to have more than one child. If it's true, I think I could compare the writing of Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts to a kind of natural childbirth. Sometimes I look at that tidy book with its dark, evocative cover and wonder just how in the heck it got here.  Continue reading...

The American Dialect Society wants to know what you think the Word of the Decade is. Which word best sums up the years from 2000 to 2009? Read the call for nominations below.  Continue reading...

Every writer knows the feeling: you've just released a carefully edited piece of prose into circulation, and when you take another look you cringe at the sight of a typo that you missed. With online writing, typos can very often be fixed without anyone even noticing. Printed errors usually require red-faced corrections. But don't feel too bad: imagine if your typos were etched in granite for all to see!  Continue reading...

Last week we interviewed the irrepressible Roy Blount, Jr. about his latest book, Alphabet Juice, an A-to-Z compendium of his musings on the glory of the English language. In this excerpt from the book's opening chapter, Blount considers the scholarly theory of the arbitrary relation between words and meanings, to which he firmly responds: "Arbitrary, schmarbitrary."  Continue reading...

As part of its series on "The Future of Reading," the New York Times reports on how school librarians must now be Internet experts. Read it here.

Hey, have you guys heard about this crazy new thing lots of teachers are doing? It's a little nuts, so you may want to sit down. I was floored myself when I heard, but lots of language arts teachers are using recently-written literature in their classrooms! Like, literature not written by Hawthorne, Williams or Dickinson. Nuts!  Continue reading...