An odd moment in this week's confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor came when Senator Orrin Hatch questioned her about a case involving martial arts weapons commonly known in English as "nunchucks" or "nunchuck sticks." The exchange between Hatch and Sotomayor sounded like something you might encounter at a Bruce Lee fan club meeting, not in a high-profile Senate hearing.  Continue reading...

We've been talking to Paul Dickson about the new edition of his magnum opus, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. Now, in honor of Major League Baseball's 80th All-Star Game, played tonight at Busch Stadium in Saint Louis, we present some all-star words from Dickson's dictionary.  Continue reading...

As Major League Baseball heads into the All-Star break, we're taking advantage of the mid-season breather to think about the rich language of baseball. We talked to Paul Dickson, the sport's great lexicographer, about the monumental Dickson Baseball Dictionary. Recently published in its third edition, the dictionary has grown into a thousand-page tome of unprecedented breadth and scope. In the first part of our two-part interview, Dickson explains how his dictionary encompasses the whole history of baseball, from the early days of "protoball" to the latest statistical advances.  Continue reading...

Teachers, looking to get students out of their seats and learning some new words? Try introducing pantomime as a vocabulary-enriching activity. As Beck, McKeown and Kucan point out in Creating Robust Vocabulary, "physically responding to words can promote connections to new word meanings."  Continue reading...

When Alaska Governor Sarah Palin burst onto the national scene less than a year ago, she made a memorable impression with an animal-related witticism. In her speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination at the 2008 Republican National Convention, she asked, "You know what the difference is between a hockey mom and a pit bull?" The answer, of course, was "lipstick." Now, as Palin exits the political stage (at least for now), she has again used a metaphor drawn from the animal kingdom.  Continue reading...

The lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary are plumbing a new source for language use: Twitter. Hear how the OED is making use of ephemeral "tweets" from Editor at Large Jesse Sheidlower, on the public radio program Future Tense.