The University of Chicago website is featuring an article about three alumni who have become "ambassadors of lexicography" and are "putting a public face on modern language studies": Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary, Erin McKean of Wordnik, and Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus. Read the article here.

On Bloggingheads, Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer joins fellow linguist John McWhorter to talk about a wide range of language issues, from new approaches to the teaching of English to the language of "Mad Men." Watch the conversation here.

The tongue-in-dictionary-cheek Speculative Grammarian website writes, "The siren song of linguistics is too appealing, you can't resist." So you declare it your major. What's next? Play their Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics to find out!

In this month's Language Lounge, our columnist Orin Hargraves looks forward to "real-time, hands-on, no-holds-barred action lexicography" at the big Dictionary Society hoedown in Chicago. Couldn't make the confab? No problem: Check out these linguists' websites for a taste of what Orin's talking about:

Café Mo

piloklok

English, Jack

A Roguish Chrestomathy

Have a burning question about language origin, morphology or perhaps the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Well, why not ask a friendly linguist! Ask-A-Linguist , a service provided by an Internet network of professional linguists, welcomes you to post language-related questions of all kinds on their site.

Geoffrey Pullum, the co-creator of the language website Language Log, sums up his site's popularity this way: "A: We like to have fun. B: We enjoy writing. And C: We're linguists." Over 40,000 people a week visit for a smart, witty, wry -- and, yes, fun -- take on how we use this English language of ours. Now Geoffrey and his collaborator Mark Liberman, both linguistics professors, have captured the flavor of their website in a new book called Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log. We called Geoffrey to talk about his work.

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