The New York Times recently ran an article on how the city of Shanghai is struggling to combat "Chinglish" — poorly (and often humorously) translated English signage. Accompanying the article was a slide show, "A Sampling of Chinglish." The Times then asked its readers for further "photos of amusingly translated or otherwise quirky signs," and the hilarious collection is now available here.

With new technology comes new language, and with new language comes new confusion over usage. Here's a question that people have been puzzling over for a couple of decades now: if we don't pluralize mail as mails, why should we pluralize e-mail as e-mails?  Continue reading...

When my 12-year-old nephew, Caleb, asked what I was going to write about for the next installment of Red Pen Diaries, I said: "The em dash." He confessed that he didn't know what that was. "Neither do most adults," I explained.  Continue reading...

A new blog has been launched by Garson O'Toole, dedicated to unearthing the truth about the origins of famous quotations. If you want to find out whether Groucho Marx really said, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana," or if Mark Twain really said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," check out Quotation Investigator.

A Spanish educational ad campaign using what appears to be "bad English" has University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron thinking about the spread of international English beyond the Anglophone world.  Continue reading...

The volcano in Iceland that has disrupted European air travel goes by the impenetrable name Eyjafjallajökull. Don't know how to pronounce it? Neither does anyone else outside of Iceland. Mark Liberman of Language Log presents some outsiders' failed attempts, as well as proper pronunciations from actual Icelanders, here.