A new online magazine, Popular Linguistics, kicks off with its first issue this week. The issue includes an invited essay by Lauren Hall-Lew, Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh, entitled "Why Do I Do What I Do?" Here's an excerpt.  Continue reading...

"Across the Internet the use of dear is going the way of sealing wax," writes Dionne Searcey in the Wall Street Journal. In its place, the much less formal hey has become the salutation of choice. Read Searcey's article here.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Ben Yagoda writes about the errors he's noticed in his students' compositions. Very often, he says, students change their writing to be "longer and more prosaic": "They give a new sound to prose. I call it clunk." Read Yagoda's guided tour to "clunk" here.

On his blog The Web of Language, Dennis Baron, a professor of English at the University of Illinois and a regular contributor to the Visual Thesaurus, runs down the top ten language-related stories of the past year, covering everything from a dictionary ban to a temple to the goddess English. Read the full list here.

"Let there be light." "A fly in the ointment." "New wine in old bottles." "My brother's keeper." All of these familiar expressions entered English through the King James version of the Bible, which is about to turn 400 years old. In his new book Begat, David Crystal traces how, more than any other literary source in history, the King James Bible contributed to the stock of English idioms and proverbs.  Continue reading...

It's time once again to break out the holiday eggnog! Ever wonder where the word eggnog comes from? Wonder no more: check out the Word Routes column that Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer wrote last holiday season, "The Origins of 'Eggnog,' Holiday Grog."

Theodore Geisel, the man we know as Dr. Seuss, would be happy to know that his books for children are ideally suited for the iPad. "The tablet delivers the active connection between words and images that Dr. Seuss always intended," L. Gordon Crovitz writes in the Wall Street Journal. Read about the success of "e-Seuss" here.