"Across the Internet the use of dear is going the way of sealing wax," writes Dionne Searcey in the Wall Street Journal. In its place, the much less formal hey has become the salutation of choice. Read Searcey's article here.

Once again the American Dialect Society has performed its not-so-solemn duty in anointing a Word of the Year (aka WOTY), and the 2010 winner is app, as in, "There's an app for that." I'm just back from Pittsburgh, where the ADS held its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and I've got the full report.  Continue reading...

The American Dialect Society’s annual meeting is coming up, and like all word nerds, I have Word of the Year fever. I won’t be in Pittsburgh for the meeting, but as the only euphemism columnist in this star quadrant, I want to make a case for euphemism of the year.  Continue reading...

Have you noticed that curators, once restricted to institutions like museums and art galleries, are now running rampant? Research librarian Stan Friedman investigates curator-mania, and discovers that people are finding comfort in an old, trusted term.  Continue reading...

It's time once again to break out the holiday eggnog! Ever wonder where the word eggnog comes from? Wonder no more: check out the Word Routes column that Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer wrote last holiday season, "The Origins of 'Eggnog,' Holiday Grog."

Last week, an exciting new tool for analyzing the history of language and culture was unveiled by Google. They call it the "Ngram Viewer," and it's an interface to study the enormous corpus of historical texts scanned by Google Books. The Ngram Viewer was rolled out in conjunction with a paper in the journal Science introducing the field of "culturomics." Dennis Baron has weighed in on the significance of this development for researchers. But what about those peculiar words, culturomics and ngram?  Continue reading...