It's time once again for the Scripps National Spelling Bee! The preliminaries are today, and the nationally televised semifinals and finals are tomorrow (May 31). Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer will be live-tweeting the competition tomorrow on the VT Twitter feed and reporting on the results here in his Word Routes column. In the meantime, read Ben's observations on tricky spelling here and here, and try the super-addictive Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee!

This week has seen many encomiums to the great children's book author Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday at the age of 83. As it happens, tomorrow marks the two hundredth birthday of one of Sendak's predecessors in playful children's literature: Edward Lear. That got me thinking about the grand tradition of wordplay in books for children, from Lear and Carroll to Seuss and Sendak.  Continue reading...

I'm no peevologist. I will gladly begin a sentence with a conjunction and end it with a preposition. I love the word moist, and I couldn't care less about irregardless. I write about euphemisms because I love them, not because I want to see them wiped from the face of the Earth.  Continue reading...

A holiday has been created out of thin air and promoted by a blogger named Shaun McCance: Passive Voice Day, to be celebrated by one and all today. Appreciation for the passive voice can be shown by using the hashtag #passivevoiceday on Twitter. As has been said by Shaun, "It's just enjoyed when things are taken to an absurd extreme." Attention has been paid from San Francisco to Australia. More can be read here.