Want to insult someone in Japanese? Try misokakku ('scum of soya paste'). In Polish, try motyla noga ('butterfly's leg'), and in Turkish, muhallebi çocuğu ('child of pudding'). These and hundreds of other colorful put-downs from around the world can be found in the delightful new book, Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit by Stephen Dodson and Dr. Robert Vanderplank. We spoke about the book with Dodson, known to many language lovers by his nom de blog, Languagehat.  Continue reading...

Earlier this week in the Book Nook section of our Educators page, we featured an excerpt from Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher's Learning Words Inside and Out, all about how teachers can use mnemonics to help students commit words to memory. Some of these memory aids are extremely well-known: most everyone knows Roy G. Biv spells out the initial letters of the seven colors in the spectrum, for instance. But there's an endless number of other mnemonic devices that get passed down from generation to generation, covering just about every field of human endeavor.  Continue reading...

Last week, in part one of our interview with author Paul Dickson, we talked about the work that went into the new edition of his Dickson Baseball Dictionary — a thousand-page monument to baseball's bottomless linguistic riches. Now in part two, Dickson discusses the diverse influences on the language of baseball, and how the sport has become a metaphorical source in politics and elsewhere.  Continue reading...

Surely the most unexpected success in the literary world this year has been Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, a campy mashup pitting Jane Austen's Bennet sisters against legions of the undead. Since its publication in April, P&P&Z has sold more than 600,000 copies, inspiring a number of other zombified takes on classic literature. Now comes word that the publisher of P&P&Z, Quirk Books, is cashing in on the trend with a new title, Sense and Sensibility and (wait for it) Sea Monsters.  Continue reading...

Reports of the demise of the crossword puzzle have been greatly exaggerated, says Visual Thesaurus puzzlemaster Brendan Emmett Quigley. Brendan — whose puzzles appear regularly in the New York Times, Paste, and The Onion, as well as on his own blog — responds to the latest doom and gloom about the future of crosswords with a note of optimism. Far from being a crossword-killer, Brendan argues, the Web is attracting bigger audiences to puzzle-solving than ever before.  Continue reading...