A new scientific study says that competitive Scrabble players possess word recognition skills far beyond the bounds of what was previously thought possible. Read all about it on ScienceBlog here.

I'm not an Apple guy, but this month I am, because the most egregious euphemisms I've come across since last month hail from the land of Steve-Jobs-istan. As covered in Language Log, "as it turns out" is Apple-ese for unfortunately, and "That's not recommended" replaces any comment remotely equivalent to "Duh!"  Continue reading...

"Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine..." So begins the winner of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which competitors write incredibly bad opening sentences to incredibly bad novels. Read the whole thing, and the rest of the results, here.

With the final Harry Potter movie opening this weekend, many are reflecting on the last legacy of J.K. Rowling's oeuvre. In print and on screen, the Harry Potter franchise has been incredibly successful, and it's only natural that such a mass phenomenon would leave its imprint on popular culture, including the popular lexicon. Rowling's inventive use of language has been a key to conjuring the fantasy world of the Potterverse, and that language has seeped into real-world usage as well.  Continue reading...

In William Goldman's terrific 1989 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting, he uses the term nonrecurring phenomenon for films whose success mystifies Hollywood executives and their magic 8-balls.  Continue reading...