Over the last few days, America's Eastern seaboard has seen record levels of snow... accompanied by record levels of snow wordplay. There has been a blizzard of "portmanteau words" involving snow, with snowmageddon and snowpocalypse leading the way. On Twitter, the hashtag of choice has been snOMG, compactly joining snow with the online interjection OMG. We haven't seen this much seasonal word-blending since 2008's "summer of the staycation."  Continue reading...

Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she takes an extended look at the troublesome issue of when to hyphenate compounds.  Continue reading...

After writing about "crash blossoms" in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I've gotten plenty of responses from readers sending in their own favorite examples of unintentionally ambiguous headlines. I've also been hearing more about an anecdote I mentioned, relating to a legendary telegram long attributed to Cary Grant.  Continue reading...

I have to admit, I'm still basking in the glow of last month's American Dialect Society meeting, when my two picks for 2009's Most Euphemistic — hiking the Appalachian trail and sea kittens — each took home an award. Hiking killed it in the euph category, while the sea kittens swam over to "Most Unnecessary" and took the prize. Booyah, and may I add, for the benefit of older readers, huzzah!  Continue reading...

Yesterday we talked to seventh-grader Tony Incorvati of Canton Country Day School, who has competed in the Scripps National Spelling Bee for the last two years and is going for a three-peat. We asked Tony to share some of his favorite words. And try Tony's Community Spelling Bee for some more tough words!  Continue reading...

Franklin P. Adams, a regular at the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s and '30s, was a master of comic verse. His best-known work is no doubt "Baseball's Sad Lexicon," an ode to the Chicago Cubs double-play combination of "Tinker to Evers to Chance." The blog Futility Closet brings to our attention another playful ode by Adams that's right up our alley: "To a Thesaurus."  Continue reading...