"Baseball has had a phenomenal influence on the English language," says writer and lexicographer Paul Dickson. Paul should know. As the author of The Hidden Language of Baseball and The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary (and over 40 other books!), he's studied the impact of America's favorite pastime on English for the past three decades. Paul graciously shared some examples of baseball lingo that's now part of everyday speech.

Designated hitter. "This is a strange construction in English, 'designated 'x'' but it gave birth to the term 'designated driver.'"

Hit-and-run. "A baseball play that's been around since the 19th century. When the automobile arrived, all of a sudden the phrase also meant 'a hit-and-run accident.'"

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An offhand comment by a former professor tipped off New York Times reporter Margalit Fox to a remarkable linguistic quest: A group of researchers studying, firsthand, the birth of a language. The birth of a language? These scientists had been working secretly in a Bedouin village in the Israeli desert that, because of an unusually high population of deaf residents, had spontaneously created its own sign language, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. What their experience teaches us about all languages, signed and spoken, is the subject of Margalit's amazing new book, Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind, and our conversation:  Continue reading...

Listening to language-related tips, talk, stories, controversies, usage questions and even a joke or two, that is. Where? On these language podcasts and internet broadcasts:

Grammar Girl

Australia's Lingua Franca

BBC's Word of Mouth

The Word Nerds

Heading to, say, India and want to bone up on your Hindi (or your Malayalam, Kannada or Oriya)? These books can help:

How To Learn Any Language by Barry M. Farber

Learning Foreign Languages: Everything You Need To Know by Brandon Simpson

The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast by A. G. Hawke

Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One by Edward Trimnell

The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer

Here's a subject a bit arcane, but totally fascinating: Writing systems of the world's languages. How did they develop? What's the difference between logographic versus syllabic versus "abugidas" systems? Appetite whetted? Check out these books:

A History of Writing: From Hieroglyph to Multimedia by Ann-Marie Christin

The World's Writing Systems by Peter T. Daniels

Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction by Geoffrey Sampson

Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe

The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script by Maurice Pope

After months in a teeming sea of words, the Loungeurs have crawled to shore to issue a report. It turns out that computers have as much to teach us about language as we have to teach them!  Continue reading...