It's time once again for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). As the website explains, it's "for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved." Visit the NaNoWriMo website to learn more.

"Words of the World" is a series of short videos presented by experts from the University of Nottingham's School of Modern Languages and Cultures. From vodka to junta, from aficionado to zeitgeist, the Nottingham scholars explore the global history of words in fascinating detail. Start watching here.

How did Shakespeare's plays originally sound? Audiences at the University of Kansas will get to find out, with a performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" entirely in the original pronunciation, the first time such a production has been staged in North America.  Continue reading...

On The Economist's Johnson blog, contributors are considering the question of why we "Google" and "Facebook," but we don't "PowerPoint" or "Excel." They've proposed some reasonable theories for brand-verbing.  Continue reading...

Newly published letters from longtime New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan reveal his efforts to popularize the word floccinaucinihili­pilificationism ("the futility of making estimates on the accuracy of public data"). Read about it on The New York Times City Room blog here.

On Language Log, the linguist Geoffrey Pullum has some interesting observations about the Twitterism "to tweet." Pullum writes, "The verb tweet is gradually developing its own syntax according to what it means and what its users regard as its combinatory possibilities." Read his post and the extended comments here.

The top financial officer in the state of New York is the Comptroller — but nobody is quite sure how to pronounce it. It originally sounded like "controller," but that pronunciation has faded. Sam Dolnick, metro reporter for The New York Times, investigates here.