Ever wonder how the food terms macaroon, macaron and macaroni are related? It turns out that all three are "rooted in the great meetings of the Islamic and Christian culinary traditions in the Middle Ages." Read all about it on The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky's wonderfully nuanced blog, here.

Recently on Slate, University of Delaware English professor Ben Yagoda tackled "the 'nonplussed' problem": How long should we cling to a word's original meaning? (Nonplussed, for instance, has changed its meaning for many people from "perplexed" to "unfazed.")  Continue reading...

Ben Trawick-Smith is an actor with a deep interest in English dialects. On his Dialect Blog, he takes on a range of interesting linguistic issues. One recent post traces the history of the pronoun y'all: "One word. Two continents. Three shores. Four centuries. Five separate dialects. Wow." Read the fascinating story here.

In Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer has the back-page essay on the latest in slang dictionaries. You can read it online here, and you can listen to Ben's discussion with Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus in the weekly podcast here. Also check out Ben's Artsbeat blog post on a 1699 slang dictionary.

The latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary has attracted a flurry of media interest, though much of the coverage has been misleading or downright inaccurate. We take a look at some of the more reasoned reactions to the inclusion of such new items as OMG, LOL, and heart (as a transitive verb, not as a symbol).  Continue reading...

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the first "tweet" on Twitter. Since then, the service has grown phenomenally, and has even been used for poetic and literary purposes. The New York Times Week in Review takes a look at the rise of "twitterature," with observations from Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer, here.

Wouldn't it be amazing if you could capture every moment of a child's language development? Deb Roy, a researcher at MIT, managed to do just that with his infant son. After wiring his house with video cameras, he then analyzed "the world's largest home video collection" to show how a bit of babble became a word. See Roy's TED talk here.