Grant Barrett, the author of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, is living a word lover's dream: By day he's a lexicographer and project editor at the Oxford University Press's "Historical Dictionary of American Slang," and by night he runs the Double-Tongued Word Wrester's Dictionary, his acclaimed website dedicated to hunting "under-documented words from the fringes of English." After getting hooked on his Double-Tongued discoveries -- from bark mitzvah to whoadie to blow a hoolie -- we had to talk to him. Here's our conversation:

VT: How do you find your Double-Tongued words?

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The Sports Closet - an area of the Lounge hitherto closed to visitors - is thrown open this month as we examine some linguistics curiosities brought to light by the recent World Cup.  Continue reading...

Besides writing the monthly Language Lounge column, distinguished lexicographer Orin Hargraves creates our unique "themed" Words of the Day. Subscriber Marije Martijn recently sent us this comment on the word "Stipple," which ran on July 24th:

I just had to be my pedantic self and comment on the word of the day: if you want to thank someone for the root "stip" of your verb 'to stipple', you should thank the Dutch. I admit, there is also a German word "Stipp," but "stip" is a Dutch word. There is even a Dutch verb, "stippelen," i.e. "to dot." I don't know of a German verb like that. But then, I am not German, so there may very well be such a verb. Best wishes, Marije

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When we ran a post called "Short Words Are Best" a few weeks ago, subscribers jammed our Inbox with comments. One in particular caught our attention:

"Sure, short words are more readable, but what about the joy that comes from solving the innermost puzzle of a long word? For a linguaphile like me, the purest ecstasy arises from finding the Latin or Greek roots in a word, putting them together, and discovering the story of a word. For example, the word "peninsula" comes from "paene" and "insula," which mean "almost" and "island," respectively. So the word peninsula literally means "almost island." Sure, it's a long word, and some students may not like to read it, but the pleasure of the shape of the word and the story of its creation makes reading it worth the while."

We appreciated this spirited defense of long words, plus we noticed the word "students" in the comment. So we emailed this person, a teacher obviously, to find out more about how she teaches language. Well, maybe not so obvious. Here was the reply:

"You just made my day! I'm no English teacher -- I'm a high school freshman!"

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When spell-check can't help you: The Scripps National Spelling Bee publishes a consolidated list of 23,413 unique words. Here are a few, ahem, vexing examples. Okay, spellers -- on your mark, get set, go:

Fieriness	Frangipane
Intussuscept	Lanai
Pharisaic	Tussock
Ugli	Umbelliferous
Umpirage	Vallecula
Vaticinate	Vicennial
Viomycin	Wampumpeag
Wassailer	Weald
Whitsunday	Yautia
Zoonosis	Zygote

We open a window in the Lounge this month onto the life to come, as suggested by a few chosen last words, illuminated in the Visual Thesaurus.  Continue reading...