You might have seen a set of American English dialect maps making the rounds online after a Business Insider piece about the maps went viral. But where does all of that survey data come from? Our own Ben Zimmer has the story on Language Log — read his post here.

I believe in equality: in society and in columns. Last month, I looked at the prolific use of gentleman in euphemisms. This month, I turn to lady. Lady euphs prove something I always suspected: the English language is seldom a well-behaved lady, but it always shows you a good time.  Continue reading...

Visual Thesaurus contributor James Harbeck recently appeared on NPR's Weekend Edition to give a phonetic breakdown of noises that teenagers often make. Listen to the segment here, and read more about teenage sounds on The Week here. Breathy-voiced long low back unrounded vowel with advanced tongue root, anyone?

On the shortlist of the American Dialect Society's word of the year for 2012 was Gangnam-style. It lost out to hashtag, but like the winner, it's a compound word (in fact all of the nominees were) and it points up an interesting feature of English: the way that people coin adjectives with the productive suffix -style, and the way in which speakers are assumed to interpret them correctly on the basis of real-world knowledge; such compounds are rarely defined in dictionaries.  Continue reading...

WARNING: Grammar lesson ahead.

If you ever knew what a "participle" was, you may have forgotten. Same with the word "gerund." And if you ever heard the term "fused participle," you probably zoned out completely.  Continue reading...

In February, the author Gary Schmidt was interviewed by Michele Norris on NPR about his novel entitled OK for Now. Schmidt said this about the book's protagonist: "He brings all of his beat-upedness with him." "Beat-upedness"?  Continue reading...