Facebook wants to trademark the word "face." The social networker which connects more than 500 million users has already shown how we can all live together as one big happy set of FBF's by forcing other sites to drop "book" from their names, and now, in application no. 78980756 to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Facebook is asserting its ownership of the word "face" as well.  Continue reading...

Did you hear about the professor of English who was removed by police from a New York Starbucks over a bagel-related language complaint? A more mild-mannered professor of English, Dennis Baron of the University of Illinois, investigates.  Continue reading...

University of Illinois English professor Dennis Baron writes:

Every once in a while some concerned citizen decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral (or "epicene") pronouns for a century and a half, all to no avail.  Continue reading...

New techniques of "digital archaeology" reveal long-lost secrets about how Thomas Jefferson tinkered with word choice while drafting the Declaration of Independence. University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron has the full story.  Continue reading...

Users of Amazon's e-reader, the Kindle, can not only highlight their favorite passages, they can see what everyone else is highlighting. University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron ponders the consequences.  Continue reading...

A Spanish educational ad campaign using what appears to be "bad English" has University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron thinking about the spread of international English beyond the Anglophone world.  Continue reading...

Apple's iPad tablet computer is being heralded as a technological advance on par with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. Mere hyperbole? University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron takes a look, and considers how the iPad might revolutionize the way we interact with text.  Continue reading...