Matthew Baldwin has challenged fiction lovers to spend this summer reading the late David Foster Wallace's gargantuan novel Infinite Jest. Think you're up to reading 1,079 pages of Wallace's inimitable prose? Join in on Baldwin's blog, Infinite Summer.

The lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary are plumbing a new source for language use: Twitter. Hear how the OED is making use of ephemeral "tweets" from Editor at Large Jesse Sheidlower, on the public radio program Future Tense.

The world has lost Michael Jackson, but his music stays with us. On the linguistics blog Language Log, Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer uncovers the origins of Jackson's nonsensical chant, "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa," and Mark Liberman follows up with an analysis of the chant's linguistic accents and musical beats.

Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters writes: "After years of weird-word collecting, I'm pretty unfazed by words with multiple, redundant, exuberant suffixes... However, even I was gobsmacked out of my chair when I spotted mystery-y-ish-y." Read all about the suffix-y pileups Mark has found on OUPblog.

When you're in need of guidance about a word or meaning, do you first turn to a dictionary or a thesaurus? New York Times columnist William Safire considers the relative merits in his latest "On Language" column. Safire doesn't just look at print references: the Visual Thesaurus gets a nice mention too!

The country known as Germany to English speakers is also known as Allemagne (in French), Tyskland (in Swedish), Niemcy (in Polish), Saksa (in Finnish), Doitsu (in Japanese), and of course Deutschland (in German). Confused? Check out Geonames for tons of info about "the countries of the world in their own languages and scripts."

The New York Times has been keeping track of the words that users of the Times website click on the most to look up definitions. The word with the most lookups in 2009 is the Latin term sui generis. Nieman Journalism Lab presents the words and crunches the numbers.