In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, I take on some modern meanings of social and related words like socialize. (Have you been in a meeting where someone has suggested socializing an idea?) We owe much of the recent rise of social-ity to those trendy online terms, social media and social networking. How did we manage to get so social simply by staring into our laptop screens?  Continue reading...

We've been exploring the online presence of companies recently in the Lounge. The language that companies use to present their public face has piqued our curiosity and we've been thinking about what purpose these self-reports from companies serve.  Continue reading...

What is "Bite-Size Edits"? It's a new website that "takes a text, chops it into pieces, and serves those pieces randomly to editors. Players get points for editing text, for providing useful comments, and for helping to get a text completely edited." Seems like a crazy idea, but it turns out to be surprisingly addictive.  Continue reading...

With the advent of the Internet, the tools for writing and publication are available to all. University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron wonders, is that really such a good thing?  Continue reading...

Learning grammar doesn't have to be dreary! Long gone are the days of sentence diagramming, or so it seems if you check out the fun interactive content on these grammar sites:

Grammaropolis

Grammar Bytes

Grammar Gorillas

"Look it up!" used to be a directive mainly about words in dictionaries; these days it's as likely to be about information on the Internet. A common experience in both cases is that you don't always find what you're looking for. This month in the Lounge we look at some of the overlapping reasons why.  Continue reading...