On Language Log, the linguist Geoffrey Pullum has some interesting observations about the Twitterism "to tweet." Pullum writes, "The verb tweet is gradually developing its own syntax according to what it means and what its users regard as its combinatory possibilities." Read his post and the extended comments here.

Linguist Neal Whitman draws a bead on the expression young guns (not to be confused with younguns), and finds that sometimes the so-called "Recency Illusion" isn't an illusion after all.  Continue reading...

I've been embracing my adopted city of Chicago by reading a collection of Chicago Tribune legend Mike Royko's writing — namely, Sez Who? Sez Me. I haven't read Royko since I was a mere tyke (or at least a small dweeb) who was too young to fully grasp the awesomeness of Royko's hilarious, sharp, wide-ranging columns. They hold up great, and one piece on the end of the Vietnam war could pretty much be reprinted verbatim right now, at the (sorta) end of the Iraq war.  Continue reading...

Remember when marketers exhorted us to trade up, spend freely, and buy more? When grand, luxe, and premier were sprinkled like shaved truffles over ad copy? That was before the recession took a bite out of our wallets and our aspirations. Nowadays, it's fashionable (not to mention necessary) to live within one's means — or to just live without.  Continue reading...

How can the Visual Thesaurus help Spanish-speaking ELL students differentiate between true and false cognates?  Continue reading...

Fitch O'Connell is a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugual and other European countries. Here Fitch examines some of the most treacherous pitfalls of the English-language classroom: "false friends," or words that appear to share a common meaning across languages but are actually different.  Continue reading...

The great secret of success in anything is to get a hearing. Half the object is gained when the audience is assembled.
—Phineas T. Barnum

Now that you're all here: it seems a suitable time to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of P. T. Barnum — a name that you probably don't associate with language in a particular way.  Continue reading...