I can only imagine how annoying the words Twitter and tweet are to people who haven't gotten in on the microblogging phenomenon. It's been over a year since I embraced all things tweet-y, and I like it so much that I continue praying to Zeus daily that Twitter never goes the way of Friendster and the pet rock. (Public service announcement: Neuter your pet rock. You can never be too careful.)  Continue reading...

Still mulling over Sarah Palin's use of the word refudiate? Check out these two commentaries. In his Good magazine column, Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters uses Refudiate-gate as an opportunity for a "Sarah Palin retrospective" here. And Geoff Nunberg argues on NPR's "Fresh Air" that the reactions to Palin's gaffe were more telling than the gaffe itself, here.

English is my native tongue, language is my beat, and corporate America is where I earn my daily crust. Nevertheless, every so often I encounter an English word — in a corporate memo, speech, or email — that mystifies me. I've seen the word before; I've just never seen it used that way. I've always assumed the word meant one thing; here it obviously means something very different.  Continue reading...

The monumental Dictionary of American Regional English is finally nearing completion after 45 years. In Newsweek DARE editor Joan Houston Hall writes that despite reports of American English becoming homogeneous, "DARE's research shows that American English is as varied as ever." Read Hall's column here.

How to use the Visual Thesaurus to facilitate creation of a Frayer Model Map, a graphic organizer for developing student vocabulary.  Continue reading...

A specter is haunting English — the specter of abused quotation marks. We notice this more and more in our reading and editing in the Lounge: the unthinking or misguided use of quotation marks where they are not required or serve no clear purpose seems to have become epidemic, perhaps nowhere more so than in the recently well-publicized open letter that the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers posted on the team's website, in which he responded to star player Lebron James' move to another team.  Continue reading...

Robert Lane Greene, a journalist for The Economist who contributes to the magazine's excellent language blog Johnson, has contributed a fascinating column on the Macmillan Dictionary blog about American English. Greene uses his own personal linguistic biography to question the whole idea of a monolithic "American English." Read the column here.