Greetings from chilly Pittsburgh! The American Dialect Society is having its annual conference here, and last night we met to select the nominees for various categories of Words of the Year. On Friday evening, winners will be selected from the different categories, and then nominations will be made for the overall category of Word of the Year. What do you think the category winners should be, and what should be crowned the Word of 2010?  Continue reading...

To open a writing class at a recent conference of New York City high school newspaper kids, I wrote this sentence on the board:

The woman stood on the hillside and looked down at the valley below.

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The American Dialect Society’s annual meeting is coming up, and like all word nerds, I have Word of the Year fever. I won’t be in Pittsburgh for the meeting, but as the only euphemism columnist in this star quadrant, I want to make a case for euphemism of the year.  Continue reading...

Teacher/novelist Michele Dunaway writes, "as much as I preach individual choice in reading, I do believe there should be some literary works that everyone in middle and high school reads and experiences." Here Michele shares some of her favorite teaching touchstones.  Continue reading...

This week's worksheet asks students to reflect on some of the major events of 2010 and to use the Visual Thesaurus to help them answer some questions about those events.  Continue reading...

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Ben Yagoda writes about the errors he's noticed in his students' compositions. Very often, he says, students change their writing to be "longer and more prosaic": "They give a new sound to prose. I call it clunk." Read Yagoda's guided tour to "clunk" here.

There's an old saying in real estate: the three most important things about a property are location, location, location. This month in the Language Lounge we discover that the same holds true for English syntax. We take a look at what happens when elements of a sentence get accidentally waylaid.  Continue reading...