I was having coffee with a friend of mine recently and she started telling me about the "voices" inside her head. As soon as she described the voices, I laughed in recognition, "Oh, we all have devils on our shoulders!" I said.  Continue reading...

Avast, ye mateys! Did you know that September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day? Arrrr, it's true! Check out the website here, and to learn more about pirate talk read Erin McKean's latest column for the Boston Globe here.

To be called a nerd these days isn't such a bad thing -- it can even be a statement of pride, a way of owning up to an all-consuming passionate interest, particularly in something technological or pop-cultural (or both). It has been reclaimed as a positive label in much the same way as geek has. The cartoonish '80s movie The Revenge of the Nerds turned out to have some prescience, as nerdy types from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have come to rule so much of 21st-century life. So it's only natural to wonder, where did the word nerd come from?  Continue reading...

Earlier this week we featured an excerpt from Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, an entertaining look at the world of competitive Scrabble, now published in a tenth anniversary edition with a special afterword on the latest Scrabble developments. Here we present another excerpt from the afterword, about the raging debates over what words to include in the official Scrabble dictionary.  Continue reading...

Writing, a form of speech, may be read aloud; writers of merit develop personal voices we hear speaking through the text. Yet much prose lies flat on the page and speaks to our eyes more than our ears.  Continue reading...

This week's worksheet gives students a chance to discover how Americans and Brits might give the same set of directions to Grandma's home using different sets of vocabulary words.  Continue reading...

Ten years ago, Stefan Fatsis published the book Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players. Since then, Scrabble has become even more competitive, thanks in part to the publicity from Word Freak. Fatsis has just released a tenth anniversary edition, with an afterword on the last decade's developments. Here we present an excerpt from the afterword about an astounding match that "rocked the Scrabble world."  Continue reading...