Filmmakers Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante have put together a short video that's a real treat for visual/verbal types, using striking images to play with the ambiguities of words. The video was made to accompany the latest episode of the WNYC show Radiolab, entitled "Words." Watch the video here and listen to the Radiolab episode here.

A lot of silly things get written about the craft of dictionary-making, but a story that appeared last week in the London-based Daily Telegraph just might be the most nonsensical article about lexicography in recent memory. The breathless headline reads, "Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered." What a scoop! Has the Telegraph blown the lid off a cabal of Dictionary Illuminati worthy of a Dan Brown novel? Yeah, not so much.  Continue reading...

When developing writers are striving to be more "descriptive" and vivid in their creative writing, they often turn to adverbs as one of their enhancement tools (understandably — since they are words that are intended to modify or qualify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.) However, when students begin to learn some of the more sophisticated standards for writing, teachers often advise them to avoid adverbs and to instead reach for powerful verbs that "show" instead of "tell" about their subjects and their actions.  Continue reading...

University of Illinois English professor Dennis Baron writes:

Every once in a while some concerned citizen decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral (or "epicene") pronouns for a century and a half, all to no avail.  Continue reading...

With everybody heading out to the beach this summer, my latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine looks at the local lingo of shore towns. Beach-related regionalisms can get quite colorful, especially when it comes to epithets for the seasonal hordes of visitors.  Continue reading...

Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First. Here Stan warns of the perilous ambiguity that can result from incautious use of the word that.  Continue reading...