Cool, a website especially dedicated to making the distinction between it's and its clear. This could start something though, how something similar for lets versus let's? Ah, when to use an apostrophe, and when not to... And on the subject of apostrophes, this article on their correct usage at Flying Solo.

This is the endorsement I've been waiting for: Punctuation Man has decided to throw his support behind the use of the serial comma, or Oxford comma, which is, of course, also known as the Harvard comma: There is no small debate about the serial comma (also known as the Oxford Comma). It is a comma used before a coordinating conjunction (such as "and") before the last item in a ... Read full entry

Canadian web accessibility guru Joe Clark has just published a book titled "Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English". My spellchecker enjoyed this excerpt also: Yes, Canadians have our own spelling. The basic facts are right there in the title: We write organize with a Z (like Americans), marvellous with two Ls (like the British, but only sometimes), and neighbour with a U (also ... Read full entry

A ranking of the most commonly used words in the English language, which currently sees "the" rank at number one, and the possibly not-so-well-known "conquistador" at number 86,800. WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and ... Read full entry

What is the hardest language to learn? Polish with its "Seven Cases, Seven Genders and very difficult pronunciation". While the average English speaker is fluent by age 12, the average Polish speaker isn't fluent until age 16. Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian, rate as "very hard". Chinese and Japanese are "fairly hard" though "easy to speak" apparently. Interestingly, as far as this English speaker is concerned, English rates as a "basic to hard" ... Read full entry