A warm welcome to our newest regular contributor, Mike Pope. As a longtime technical writer and editor at Microsoft, Mike has developed some special know-how in that favorite techie shorthand, the acronym. Here Mike explains the ins and outs of acronyms and initialisms.  Continue reading...

Merrill Perlman explains why journalists should appreciate the special connotations of seemingly synonymous words.  Continue reading...

Have you noticed how the word awesome once meant "awe-inspiring" or "extraordinarily good," but now just means, well, "good"? It's a case of semantic inflation, according to The Economist's Robert Lane Greene. Read his fascinating exploration of the word's plunge into mediocrity in Intelligent Life magazine here.

To be called a nerd these days isn't such a bad thing -- it can even be a statement of pride, a way of owning up to an all-consuming passionate interest, particularly in something technological or pop-cultural (or both). It has been reclaimed as a positive label in much the same way as geek has. The cartoonish '80s movie The Revenge of the Nerds turned out to have some prescience, as nerdy types from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have come to rule so much of 21st-century life. So it's only natural to wonder, where did the word nerd come from?  Continue reading...

Earlier this week we featured an excerpt from Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, an entertaining look at the world of competitive Scrabble, now published in a tenth anniversary edition with a special afterword on the latest Scrabble developments. Here we present another excerpt from the afterword, about the raging debates over what words to include in the official Scrabble dictionary.  Continue reading...

Ten years ago, Stefan Fatsis published the book Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players. Since then, Scrabble has become even more competitive, thanks in part to the publicity from Word Freak. Fatsis has just released a tenth anniversary edition, with an afterword on the last decade's developments. Here we present an excerpt from the afterword about an astounding match that "rocked the Scrabble world."  Continue reading...