It's fair to say that when it comes to online discourse we live in the Golden Age of Snark. (That's snark as in "snide commentary," not the imaginary animal of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "The Hunting of the Snark.") When every statement you make is open to sarcastic rebuttals, sometimes the best policy is to ridicule yourself before someone else has the chance. Nowhere is this more true than Twitter, where the convention of the "hashtag" has been pressed into the service of self-mockery.  Continue reading...

Ever wonder what those squiggly words are that you have to spell in order to get past security on many websites? They're called CAPTCHAs, and Mike Pope, a technical writer and editor at Microsoft, has the full story on them.  Continue reading...

If we divide up the short list of English parts of speech according to status, adjectives are at the top of the B-list. The elites, nouns and verbs, seem to get everyone's attention because without them, sentences wouldn't have a job.  Continue reading...

The Chronicle of Higher Education has launched a group blog called "Lingua Franca: Language and Writing in Academe." The all-star lineup of bloggers includes Geoffrey K. Pullum, Ben Yagoda, Allan Metcalf, Carol Fisher Saller, and Lucy Ferris. In the first post, Metcalf debunks the notion that sentences should never start with "and" or "but." Read it here.

Is it possible for a word to have no alphabetic letters? Stan Carey, a regular Visual Thesaurus contributor, considers the question on his blog, Sentence First. Among the no-letter words he examines are +1 ("plus one"), 1337 ("leet"), @ ("at"), and ♥ ("heart"). Read his blog post here.

Yesterday, the east coast of the United States was struck by a 5.8-magnitude earthquake — or, as it was frequently described in news accounts, a "temblor." Fortunately, the damage caused by the quake was limited, so instead we can contemplate the question: what the heck is a temblor? Or should the word be tremblor?  Continue reading...