I've been asked to get the word out.* So I'll actually get out two words: whooga and ugg. First, I like the word whooga. According to Sarah at Whoogaboots, whooga "is vowel is playful. Hula Hoop. Loop de Loop. Toodaloo. Foofaroo. Whoop-de-doo. Now on...

This NSFW caption is brought to you by the letter C. (via might red pen on Twitter. Image from Criggo's post.)

Every time I teach about the history of the English Language I go over the confusion caused by minims in older scripts. Minims are those little vertical lines used to write s, s, s, and s, and occasionally other letters in combination with other...

Oxford University Press has chosen unfriend as its word of the year for 2009. To unfriend is "To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook." Christine Lindberg explains that unfriend assumes a verb sense of...

The metaphor of language as music is fruitful. When I used to perform music publicly, my teacher (Roger Jackson) gave me a bit of advice that I should follow more often. "If you make a mistake," he said, "make it proudly." His thinking was that more...