When authors come to Google to give informal talks, videos get posted for all the world to see. Here are some language-related talks you might enjoy.

Erin McKean

Tom Dalzell

Geoffrey Nunberg

Steven Pinker

Noam Chomsky

Recently, my friend Diane started feeling nauseous and passing out. After a scary trip to the emergency room, she learned the problem was her heart: it kept stopping every once in a while, so she was strongly advised to get a pacemaker. (She now has one and is doing great, thank Zeus.)

But when Diane was debating what to do, a doctor not only came down in favor of pacemaker insertion, but a certain word choice as well:

"Oh, it's not a surgery," the doctor said. "It's only a procedure."  Continue reading...

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash along with Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. Rather than glumly mope about "The Day the Music Died," as Don McLean dubbed the tragedy in the well-worn song, "American Pie," I'd prefer to reflect on what a tremendously gifted singer/songwriter Holly was. He had a beautiful touch with the English language (sung in his signature hiccupy style), and in his lyrics he found ways to take familiar words and phrases and innovatively shape them into his own. Here are my brief thoughts on the language of four of his songs.  Continue reading...

Is a picture worth a thousand words? Possibly, but if your job is to assign words to pictures, it would be good if you could reduce that number a bit, and perhaps focus on quality rather than quantity. This month in the Lounge we've been thinking about the relationship between words and pictures, while in recovery from a brief addiction to Google Image Labeler.  Continue reading...