Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First. Here Stan enlightens us about an Irish word borrowed into English, galore.  Continue reading...

New York's Museum of Modern Art has made an unusual acquisition. According to a blog post by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the museum's Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA has acquired the @ symbol.  Continue reading...

It's been a whirlwind week since the official announcement that I would be taking over the "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, the old stomping grounds of the late lamented Language Maven, William Safire. I'm grateful for all of the warm messages of congratulation I've received, and I also remain cognizant that in taking over Safire's column, I have extremely big shoes to fill.  Continue reading...

Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer has been named the new "On Language" columnist by the New York Times Magazine. The Magazine's editor, Gerald Marzorati has written an introduction for Zimmer's debut column. Read it here.

On the New York Times blog Schott's Vocab, readers posed questions to two experts in the field of invented languages: Paul Frommer, who created the Na'vi language for Avatar, and Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages. Check out their fascinating responses here.

We are very pleased to announce that Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, has just been named the "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He will be replacing William Safire, who passed away last year after writing the "On Language" column for thirty years. Beginning with the March 21 issue of the Magazine, Ben will be writing the column on a biweekly basis.  Continue reading...