These books track the linguistic games politicians, companies, the media -- and yes, you and I -- play to hide what we really mean. Part dictionaries, part social commentaries, altogether intriguing:

The Evasion-English Dictionary by Maggie Balistreri

How Not To Say What You Mean by R. W. Holder

Slam Dunks and No-Brainers by Leslie Savan

You know what "booze" means, of course, but what if you asked someone in London for a definition -- say, 500 years ago? Lexicographer Jonathon Green will tell you the word is a lot older than you might think. He's spent the last quarter century studying slang, and its history, in the English language. The respected editor of the authoritative Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon's written over a dozen books on the subject and has collected a database of over 100,000 slang words. He's now working on a mammoth multi-volume dictionary, due out in 2008, that will cover a half a millennium's worth of words, phrases and figures of speech -- salty and otherwise -- that have seeped into English as slang. We talked to Jonathon about his passion:

Word lovers, listen up: Grant Barrett, creator of the Double-Tongued Word Wrester's Dictionary and a lexicographer at the Oxford University Press, recommends these blogs on language:

Separated by a Common Language. Lynne Murphy is an American linguist working and living in the U.K. She writes about variations between British and American English.

Language Log. One of the smartest group blogs on any topic anywhere on the Anglophone Internet, featuring respected linguists and grammarians commenting on the mundane, arcane, and profane. A key to the blog's success is that the various posters disagree as often as they agree? meaning more than one school of thought is represented, rather than whatever is faddish or fashionable.

Verbatim, the Language Quarterly. A neat and nifty newsletter with fun, funny, and quirky articles from a variety of authors. Edited by my Oxford University Press colleague Erin McKean.

Grant Barrett, the author of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, is living a word lover's dream: By day he's a lexicographer and project editor at the Oxford University Press's "Historical Dictionary of American Slang," and by night he runs the Double-Tongued Word Wrester's Dictionary, his acclaimed website dedicated to hunting "under-documented words from the fringes of English." After getting hooked on his Double-Tongued discoveries -- from bark mitzvah to whoadie to blow a hoolie -- we had to talk to him. Here's our conversation:

VT: How do you find your Double-Tongued words?

Besides writing the monthly Language Lounge column, distinguished lexicographer Orin Hargraves creates our unique "themed" Words of the Day. Subscriber Marije Martijn recently sent us this comment on the word "Stipple," which ran on July 24th:

I just had to be my pedantic self and comment on the word of the day: if you want to thank someone for the root "stip" of your verb 'to stipple', you should thank the Dutch. I admit, there is also a German word "Stipp," but "stip" is a Dutch word. There is even a Dutch verb, "stippelen," i.e. "to dot." I don't know of a German verb like that. But then, I am not German, so there may very well be such a verb. Best wishes, Marije