Award-winning educator Bob Greenman says teachers should promote pun-making in the classroom. "The pun is liberating," Greenman writes. "It says to students, you can make language do as you please. You can twist words to make them your own. You can make connections between two entirely different things and think on two planes at once. You can improvise language and play with words. Isn't that a great thing to help develop in students?"  Continue reading...

The field of natural language processing doesn't usually get showcased in a widely watched game show, but that's exactly what happened on Jeopardy! over the last three evenings, as IBM's Watson supercomputer squared off against the two best humans ever to play the game. IBM had sunk tens of millions of dollars in research money to develop Watson over the past four years, and a loss would have been highly embarrassing. Luckily for IBM, and unluckily for the carbon-based life forms Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Watson came through with flying colors.  Continue reading...

IBM's Watson super-computer is taking on two humans, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, on the game show "Jeopardy!" An earlier sparring partner, Greg Lindsay, discovered that ambiguous language was Watson's Achilles heel. Read about Lindsay's experience here. (And follow Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer's live-tweeting of the tournament on the VT Twitter feed.)

The Pittsburgh Steelers meet the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl this weekend, and the Washington Post has a guide to Pittsburgh and Wisconsin lingo. Steelers fans might say, "Redd up the house, company's comin!" A Packers touchdown might be greeted with "Uff-da!" Read all about it here.

In advance of the Super Bowl, Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer tackles the aggressive lingo of football in his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine. Read the column here, and listen to sportswriters discuss the column on Slate's "Hang Up and Listen" podcast here (starting at 33:30).