A recent trip to an amusement park with his sons Doug and Adam got linguist Neal Whitman thinking about the evolution of the word awesome, and how it took such a different historical turn from its sibling awful.  Continue reading...

Last Sunday I responded to an intriguing question from a reader of the New York Times Magazine "On Language" column, dealing with a meaning of the word revert that was previously unfamiliar to me. As I discovered, revert can mean "reply" in a number of varieties of world English, particularly the English of the Indian subcontinent. But revert is hardly the only English word that has moved on a special trajectory in Indian English.  Continue reading...

Would you still purchase a "3-piece European-style outdoor bistro set" if you had to pay a "European-style value-added-tax" on it? This month in the Lounge we look at the changing fortunes of all things European.  Continue reading...

Word Routes, the regular column by Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer, was selected as one of the Top 100 Language Blogs of 2010, in a worldwide competition hosted by bab.la and Lexiophiles. Language blogs were nominated and then ranked according to user votes and other criteria. Check out the whole list here.

In the latest issue of The American Scholar, psycholinguistics graduate student Jessica Love explains how she became entranced with a mild-mannered part of speech, the pronoun. "I have fallen for pronouns," Love writes. "It's hard to shut me up about them."  Continue reading...

Contentini, a UK-based content strategy firm, has analyzed 75 years of British parliamentary debates to determine trends in the political use of language. Key words like stakeholder and innovation have risen in usage, while others like industry and men have fallen. Read about it here.