A new blog has been launched by Garson O'Toole, dedicated to unearthing the truth about the origins of famous quotations. If you want to find out whether Groucho Marx really said, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana," or if Mark Twain really said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," check out Quotation Investigator.

As the massive oil disaster unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico, John Conway of the Cosmic Variance blog wonders what name we will eventually settle on for the environmental catastrophe. The "BP Deepwater Horizon Spill"? The "Transocean/BP Leak"? Read more here.

A new usage of the word blog is emerging, and not everyone is happy about it. As Grant Barrett writes on the blog of the Copyediting newsletter, for some people blog can now mean "a single, dated, first-person post on a web site" rather than "an entire site of such posts." But according to an informal survey, most copy editors aren't on board with the new meaning.  Continue reading...

The volcano in Iceland that has disrupted European air travel goes by the impenetrable name Eyjafjallajökull. Don't know how to pronounce it? Neither does anyone else outside of Iceland. Mark Liberman of Language Log presents some outsiders' failed attempts, as well as proper pronunciations from actual Icelanders, here.

The annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society is in full swing, held this year in Philadelphia. Among the panels is one devoted to grammar questions, featuring Visual Thesaurus editor and New York Times language columnist Ben Zimmer. Even if you're not in Philly, you can follow the action on the ACES blog.

New York's Museum of Modern Art has made an unusual acquisition. According to a blog post by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the museum's Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA has acquired the @ symbol.  Continue reading...