Have a burning question about language origin, morphology or perhaps the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Well, why not ask a friendly linguist! Ask-A-Linguist , a service provided by an Internet network of professional linguists, welcomes you to post language-related questions of all kinds on their site.

It's official: The American Dialect Society has voted "plutoed" as their 2006 Word of the Year. The word derives from Pluto, which lost its "planet" status last year, of course. Wondering what plutoed means? Please click here.

Visual Thesaurus subscriber Antonio P. from Bogota, Colombia, writes: "As a professional English-Spanish translator I'm always fascinated (and frustrated) by the speedy arrival of neologisms into the English language. When I'm translating Internet-speak into Spanish, my "neologism" alarm is working overtime. Check out this link, you'll be amused." Many thanks for your contribution, Antonio!

Business writer and author Michael Stelzner has compiled his list of the top ten writer blogs. He says they "all provide extremely useful information for writers." See if you agree. Check out the list here.

Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle board of directors, lists its members' favorite books of 2006. Critic Bruce Allen talks about his:

"The one book of 2006 that I would urge readers not to miss is Edward P. Jones's second short story collection All Aunt Hagar's Children. It's easy to lose track of Jones, who publishes so infrequently. But his first collection Lost in the City and Pulitzer-winning novel The Known World are genuine classics: richly detailed, brilliantly imagined explorations of Afro-American life, both as history and as images of the here and now, that are unsurpassed in our fiction."

To read about more books, check out the website here.

Can't decide on a book? Let the What Should I Read Next website help! "Enter a book you like," it says, "and the site will analyze our database of real readers' favorite books to suggest what you could read next." Give it a try here.

The Eggcorn Database is "devoted to collecting unusual English spellings that have come to be called eggcorns." (See this week's "Behind the Dictionary" feature for a related story.) Compiled by a group of linguists, the site looks at lexical errors that "tell us something about how ordinary speakers and writers make sense of the language they use." To find out how "tow the line," "fullproof," "beyond approach," and yes, "given up the goat" came to be click here.