Accurate and dependable machine translation has long been a dream among linguists and computer scientists alike. Will computers get there eventually? Possibly.  Continue reading...

While millions of people are tweeting and retweeting every day, a small fraction of them are also subtweeting, and if news stories are to be believed, they are not doing so very successfully. Recent news stories alerted me to the idea of subtweeting and got me thinking about the conversational aspects of Tweets and their sub-cousins.  Continue reading...

A couple of years ago I wrote about irritating the habit of clickbait purveyors to withhold critical information in the text of their clickable link in order to tantalize readers. The promise is that the thirst for missing but suggested information will be slaked with a simple click. Since then, the tendency has gotten worse.  Continue reading...

Laughter is always good medicine, and today the Internet has put at our disposal the ability to draw it out through the combination in unexpected ways of two things that pervade modern culture: pictorial representation and vernacular language.  Continue reading...

I was reading a document at work once and ran across this statement: "Core contracts within the product are interface-based and are easily mockable." My programmer-to-English translation filter was momentarily confused, and for a brief but amusing moment I thought, "You mean, we can laugh at them?"  Continue reading...

HuffPost Live hosted a chat about the uncertain future of dictionaries in the digital era. Among the panelists was our own Ben Zimmer, who talked about how the move away from the printed page opens up exciting new possibilities for what a dictionary can do.  Continue reading...