Just in time for the holidays, Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters has rounded up a selection of gift-related words and phrases for his latest "Wordtastic" column in Good Magazine — covering everything from Seinfeldian "regifting" to "shopper's block." Read it here.

Is there any drink more seasonal than eggnog, that Yuletide mixture of sweetened milk, beaten eggs, and (at least traditionally) liquor? As we head into the peak time for eggnog consumption, let's put aside our mugs and stop to consider where the word eggnog actually comes from.  Continue reading...

The early nominations have been posted for the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year selection. ADS members who specialize in following language trends, including Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer, have submitted their lists of nominees. Read all about it here.

As we bid farewell to the strangely nameless first decade of the 21st century, University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron takes a look back at the lingo that enlivened the last ten years.  Continue reading...

Last week, members of the Special Libraries Association were asked to vote on a radical renaming of their organization: it was proposed that the SLA become the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals, or ASKPro. The contentious wrangling over the proposal revealed deep ambivalence about the words library and librarian in the digital age. We asked Stan Friedman, senior research librarian for Condé Nast Publications, for some insights into the terminological debate.  Continue reading...

This time last year, David Letterman was making jokes about Blagojeviching, playing on the name of disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Now we've got a brand-new political eponym on our hands: Salahi is being used as a verb meaning "to gate-crash an official event."  Continue reading...