The University of Chicago website is featuring an article about three alumni who have become "ambassadors of lexicography" and are "putting a public face on modern language studies": Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary, Erin McKean of Wordnik, and Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus. Read the article here.

Have you finished your Grouponicus shopping, or are you waiting till the last minute? Perhaps you prefer the austere rituals of Festivus or the Judeo-Christian compromise of Chrismukkah. Or is the pantheistic free-for-all known as Chrismahanukwanzakah more to your end-of-the-year taste?  Continue reading...

We are pleased to announce that the World Technology Network (WTN) has named the Visual Thesaurus the winner of the 2010 World Technology Award for education. The honor, bestowed by the WTN at its World Technology Summit in New York City, recognizes the innovative contributions that the Visual Thesaurus and its parent company Thinkmap, Inc. have made in the educational field.  Continue reading...

The international diplomatic community was abuzz this week, reeling from "Cablegate," the scandalous revelation of secret diplomatic cables by Wikileaks. But what's a "cable" anyway, in this day and age? Our resident linguist Neal Whitman investigates.  Continue reading...

The modern, and somewhat cynical line on poets is that they should not quit their day jobs. Poet pay is dismal or nonexistent; the opportunities for contemporary recognition, minuscule; and the chances for posthumous celebration, hardly to be taken seriously. We’re taking a contrarian view in the Lounge this month, as we dust off the Poetry Corner and pay a visit to a poet who never really had a day job, but who left an enduring imprint on the language, echoes of which can still be heard every day throughout the wide world of English.  Continue reading...

Before the beginning of the school year, we heard from Teachers At Work contributor Shannon Reed about a grant she had received to incorporate playwriting into a high-school science curriculum. Now Shannon returns with an update on this innovative cross-curricular program, which she has dubbed "SciPlay."  Continue reading...

Sarah Palin's political opponents made hay out of her gaffe last Wednesday, when she said on Glenn Beck's radio show that "We gotta stand with our North Korean allies," when she meant "South Korean allies." Palin fought back with a Thanksgiving Facebook message that pointed to numerous slips of the tongue by President Obama. I don't find her "North Korean" error particularly remarkable (she was swiftly corrected by Beck, and she didn't confuse North and South Korea elsewhere in her remarks). I was more interested in what she said before that: "We're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do." Was her use of sanction also erroneous?  Continue reading...