Word Routes, the regular column by Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer, was selected as one of the Top 100 Language Blogs of 2010, in a worldwide competition hosted by bab.la and Lexiophiles. Language blogs were nominated and then ranked according to user votes and other criteria. Check out the whole list here.

In the latest issue of The American Scholar, psycholinguistics graduate student Jessica Love explains how she became entranced with a mild-mannered part of speech, the pronoun. "I have fallen for pronouns," Love writes. "It's hard to shut me up about them."  Continue reading...

Contentini, a UK-based content strategy firm, has analyzed 75 years of British parliamentary debates to determine trends in the political use of language. Key words like stakeholder and innovation have risen in usage, while others like industry and men have fallen. Read about it here.

Computational linguist David Bamman has created a fascinating new website called Lexicalist. By analyzing Twitter and other social media, he has mapped the U.S. according to what people are talking about, and how they're saying it. Bamman explains how the project came together in a guest Language Log post here.

Thanks to Chatroulette, the ridiculously popular website that pairs random strangers around the world for webcam conversations, we have a new verb in English: to next. Two language-related blogs explain what it means.  Continue reading...

Chris Pash, who works for Dow Jones Asia-Pacific, has been using the Factiva news database to track the most overused journalistic expressions. He's come up with a list of the top seven cliches, from "at the end of the day" to "concerned residents." Read all about it here.

The New York Times recently ran an article on how the city of Shanghai is struggling to combat "Chinglish" — poorly (and often humorously) translated English signage. Accompanying the article was a slide show, "A Sampling of Chinglish." The Times then asked its readers for further "photos of amusingly translated or otherwise quirky signs," and the hilarious collection is now available here.