"Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine..." So begins the winner of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which competitors write incredibly bad opening sentences to incredibly bad novels. Read the whole thing, and the rest of the results, here.

The BBC Magazine ran a piece by Matthew Engel last week entitled, "Why do some Americanisms irritate people?" The Beeb then asked its readers to single out the American expressions they most despise, and in a followup gathered the top 50 peeves. The reader query generated a huge response -- 1,295 comments were posted before the BBC closed down the comment section -- but the most entertaining and incisive reactions came from language bloggers.  Continue reading...

What is the most beautiful word in the English language? This question was recently posed on GalleyCat, the Mediabistro blog covering the publishing industry. GalleyCat has its own suggestions, and recommends that readers use the Visual Thesaurus to map out their own favorite words.  Continue reading...

At England's Ledbury Poetry Festival, poets were asked to single out "the expressions that have become such cliches that they have lost all meaning." Their responses range from "think outside the box" to "I am a very spiritual person." Read the cliches they selected, with commentary, at The Guardian here.

On the 4th of July, there's no better time to dig into the origins of the term "hot dog." Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer recently took a look at the earliest known evidence for "hot dog" from Paterson, New Jersey. You can read his Word Routes column on the subject here, and you can hear him talking about the latest research today on NPR's Morning Edition.

On the linguistics blog Language Log, Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania has "a terrible idea that could probably make someone a modest fortune." What if you could combine "a speech recognizer with a style checker" to create "an app for your smartphone that will make it vibrate (or beep, or flash) whenever you indulge in any of the verbal tics that you've asked it to watch out for"? Read Liberman's reluctant proposal here.

A new batch of words has been added to Oxford Dictionaries Online, and the additions lean heavily on the lingo of online communication. "The world of computers and social networking continues to be a major influence on the English language," the Oxford announcement says, and sure enough the list has everything from Twittersphere to overshare to ZOMG. (The last one is a playfully misspelled version of OMG, as if someone is a bit too excited to type it correctly.) A sample follows below.  Continue reading...