Thanks to Chatroulette, the ridiculously popular website that pairs random strangers around the world for webcam conversations, we have a new verb in English: to next. Two language-related blogs explain what it means.  Continue reading...

Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First. Here a children's book about weather leads Stan to ponder which English words best describe what happens to air when it is heated by lightning.  Continue reading...

Chris Pash, who works for Dow Jones Asia-Pacific, has been using the Factiva news database to track the most overused journalistic expressions. He's come up with a list of the top seven cliches, from "at the end of the day" to "concerned residents." Read all about it here.

During the global economic crisis of the last few years, previously esoteric financial jargon has worked its way into public discourse. One such term is quant, a shorthand term for "quantitative analyst." They're the subject of Scott Patterson's new book, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, and I take on the term in my latest On Language column in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It's a timely topic, given the mysterious 1,000-point dip in the Dow Jones index last week, variously blamed on quants and "fat fingers."  Continue reading...

The "call to action" is one of the sacrosanct elements of ads and direct mail: Lose weight! Save money! Act now! How unorthodox, then, to discover calls to inaction — invitations to simply think — in a spate of recent ad campaigns.  Continue reading...

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...