Visiting Australia earlier this week, President Obama broke the ice by injecting some Australian slang into his public speeches. He used a selection of Aussie-isms like chinwag and ear-bashing for comic effect, but it's probably a good thing that he didn't go overboard by trying to mimic a broad Australian English accent (often called "Strine"). British Prime Minister David Cameron, meanwhile, wasn't so lucky: he got into some hot water for an ill-advised attempt at Strine.  Continue reading...

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of taking part in a lively panel discussion entitled "More than a Century of Style," celebrating The Chicago Manual of Style. The event, held at the University of Chicago and sponsored by the public radio station WBEZ, brought out more than two hundred committed stylistas, with hundreds more tuning in to a live stream on Facebook. Here's an indication of the type of crowd that braved that rainy Chicago night: when University of Chicago Press managing editor Anita Samen announced that she was "passionately pro-serial-comma," she was met with rapturous applause.  Continue reading...

In last Sunday's New York Times, I wrote about how researchers are using Twitter to build huge linguistic datasets in order to answer all sorts of interesting analytical questions. Some are looking at the emotional responses of Libyans to unfolding events like the death of Qaddafi, while others are tracking the distribution of regional patterns in American English. This latter research area, Twitter dialectology, is just getting off the ground, but the results are already quite intriguing.  Continue reading...

A new play is opening tonight on Broadway, and it's a treat for language lovers. It's called "Chinglish," and it was written by David Henry Hwang, who won a Tony Award for "M. Butterfly." I had a chance to talk to Hwang about his comic exploration of the perils of cross-linguistic misunderstanding.  Continue reading...

In this year's World Series, one name in particular will likely catch the eye of even casual baseball fans. In the late innings of the first two games, a relief pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals came in to face the Texas Rangers: Marc Rzepczynski. The announcers were clearly ready for Rzepczynski's appearance and pronounced his name smoothly (as "zep-CHIN-ski"), helpfully explaining that his nickname is "Scrabble." So how does Rzepczynski stack up against other hard-to-spell baseball names?  Continue reading...

The public protest over economic inequalities known as "Occupy Wall Street" has been going on nearly a month now, with the original demonstration in Manhattan's Financial District spreading to cities around the world. Thanks to the success of the movement, the lingo of the protesters has spread quickly, with the verb occupy in particular becoming a kind of rallying cry.  Continue reading...

After the passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on Wednesday, the outpouring of sympathy on Twitter was overwhelming, with an estimated 10,000 tweets per second. Several of the top "trending topics" over the following day were Jobs-related, marked by the hashtags #ThankYouSteve, #iSad, #ThinkDifferent, and #StayHungry. Even in death, Jobs's unique and spirited way with words was palpable.  Continue reading...