Last week, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum held an online panel discussion entitled "The Name Game," in conjunction with their exhibition of sculptures by John Chamberlain, who gave his works highly unusual titles. The panel was asked, what makes a "good" name from the perspective of art, marketing, or linguistics? What functions does a name or title fulfill? Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer took part.  Continue reading...

A holiday has been created out of thin air and promoted by a blogger named Shaun McCance: Passive Voice Day, to be celebrated by one and all today. Appreciation for the passive voice can be shown by using the hashtag #passivevoiceday on Twitter. As has been said by Shaun, "It's just enjoyed when things are taken to an absurd extreme." Attention has been paid from San Francisco to Australia. More can be read here.

The New Yorker asked its Twitter followers, if you could eliminate one word from the English language, what would it be? The most-tweeted suggestion turned out to be moist, a word that also bothers many Visual Thesaurus subscribers. Despite the mass aversion to moist, the editors declared another word the winner: slacks. Read all about it here.

The big news in the copy editing world this week was the revelation that the Associated Press Stylebook would no longer hold the line against the long-stigmatized use of "hopefully" as a sentence adverb to mean "It is hoped." The announcement elicited some strong reactions both pro and con. Here is a roundup of some of the online responses to the stylebook change.  Continue reading...

The latest issue of the literary magazine Lapham's Quarterly has as its theme "Means of Communication," and the closing piece, by VT editor Ben Zimmer, is a reconsideration of the thesaurus as a tool for modern writers. He finds many reasons to remain optimistic about the thesaurus as a reference work (and not just because of the Visual Thesaurus!). Read his piece here.

Last week we brought you coverage of the 35th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held in Brooklyn. But there was another wordy competition held in conjuction with the ACPT: the first-ever World Palindrome Championship. Here's a full report of the back-and-forth action from The Palindromist Magazine.  Continue reading...

Sunday, at long last, marks the return of the acclaimed television series "Mad Men." We're big fans of the show, but we also enjoy nitpicking about it. Read Ben Zimmer's Word Routes column about an anachronistic dictionary prop here, and about the historical accuracy of the dialogue here.