Use Alan Brown's Sports Literacy Blog to find creative ways to encourage jocks to read! On Alan's blog, you'll find lots of links to popular sports-related texts, organized by genre – e.g., baseball, football, cycling, and even rock climbing. Since the site's curator, Alan Brown, spent years as a high school teacher and as a basketball coach, he knows how to excite students about reading through sports stories.

Next month marks the 44th anniversary of the Woodstock festival, and we're still hearing its echoes. One of Woodstock's most enduring legacies is its influence on language. Wherever there's an "X-stock" festival, from Artstock in Oregon to Zoostock in Pennsylvania, from Rootstock in Santa Rosa, California, to Bloodstock in Derbyshire, UK, Woodstock lives on.  Continue reading...

Edward Snowden's leaking of National Security Agency information has put the term whistleblower back in the news. Since the early 1970s, whistleblower has come to be seen as a positive term, but before that it had been decidedly negative for many decades.  Continue reading...

Claire Hardaker, a linguist at Lancaster University in the U.K., recently published a survey of "trolling," i.e., "behavior of being deliberately antagonistic or offensive via computer-mediated communication (CMC), typically for amusement's sake." In the wake of the media attention her work has received, Hardaker considers the varying definitions people have for the word "troll."  Continue reading...

"Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling was recently revealed to have written a crime novel, "The Cuckoo's Calling," using the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. How she was found out involved a couple of linguistic experts analyzing the "little words" that are used in the novel's text.  Continue reading...

Last month, I introduced the idea of a zombie rule: a false grammar rule that is taught and followed slavishly as though it were the real thing. Like their namesakes, these rules have no life in them, but they keep returning no matter how many times their true form is revealed.  Continue reading...

One man "pleaded guilty to DWI." Another "pled guilty of DWI." A third "entered a plea of guilty to DWI charges."

What's going on, aside from way too much drinking?  Continue reading...