Last week, the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year honors went to the Twitter-friendly hashtag. But another techie term emerged in a less prestigious category, Least Likely to Succeed. Finishing in a virtual tie with the much-maligned acronym YOLO was phablet, a blend of phone and tablet coined for new devices that are not quite smartphones and not quite tablet computers.  Continue reading...

When the US government finally signed a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, I was quickly confused about what the deal was. On the airwaves, I heard that part of the deal would be a 2% increase in payroll taxes, yet in print, I read that there was to be a 2 percentage point increase.  Continue reading...

Michele Dunaway teaches English and journalism at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles, Missouri (when she's not writing best-selling romance novels). As 2012 begins, she's been thinking about some New Year's resolutions for the classroom. Here she shares seven of them.  Continue reading...

How can the Visual Thesaurus help students learn some interesting and polysemous science words?  Continue reading...

A Florida correspondent writes: "My boss is obsessed with Strunk & White, and so tells me that I can never start a sentence with 'however' when using it to mean 'nevertheless.' I disagree with him and say that I can start a sentence with 'however' when I mean 'nevertheless' if I put a comma after the 'however.'"  Continue reading...

We all like good writing and dislike bad writing; we all want to write well, not badly. Yet the words "good" and "bad," when applied to any work of art are so much matters of taste that they often seem empty as definitions and arbitrary as categories.  Continue reading...

"Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious," the sesquipedalian word made famous by Mary Poppins, has a peculiar and contentious history. Ben Zimmer told the story of his hunt for the word's origins, ending up in Syracuse, in his Word Routes column. Syracuse Post-Standard columnist Sean Kirst talked to Zimmer about the search in his latest column. Read it here.