New word of the day: tremendomeatatarianism. A tremendomeatatarian is someone who only undertakes to eat meat that is “tremendously delicious”.
The tremendomeatatarian respects the fact that his food came from a living being, which died to provide him with dinner, and which may have suffered or be rare and overfished. Or perhaps it’s bad for [...]

Saying hello first to someone you are speaking to on the phone may help them better understand what you ask for next, as it allows them time to comprehend your vocal range, something that is usually more instantaneous in face to face situations.
Vowel sounds are made by using the mouth as a resonating cavity, [...]

Words and terms such as “d’oh”, “regift”, and the Wayne’s World-ian use of “not” (this is a new word – not!), rather than being relatively new, have merely emerged from hiatus, according to study of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
“Truthiness” is a great example of a sleeping beauty. Seemingly coined in the debut episode of [...]

Alex Horne writes about his quest to have a word he invented accepted into the Oxford English Dictionary.
Just thinking about having my own word in the Oxford English Dictionary gets me giddy. A verbal invention would represent the ultimate achievement, the finest legacy to leave my progeny. It’s exciting enough to have people look [...]

Artificial languages such as Esperanto (or Na’vi for that matter), offer the chance to create a “perfect” language, that has clear rules and structures from the get-go, rather than many “natural” languages which have evolved, sometimes somewhat erratically, over time.
So why go against the odds (not to mention nature itself) and make up your [...]

The extreme isolation of some the tribes and villages in Papua New Guinea is behind the rise of some 800 languages in the region, a concentration not seen in any other part of the world.
Deep valleys and unforgiving terrain have kept the different tribes of Papua New Guinea relatively isolated, so that the groups’ [...]

15 words that Lake Superior State University proposes be banished from the Queen’s English. Don’t stop there though, purge these terms from standard English, Australian English, in fact all forms of English…
Word “czars” at Lake Superior State University “unfriended” 15 words and phrases and declared them “shovel-ready” for inclusion on the university’s 35th annual [...]

Linguist Paul Frommer, creator of the fictional Na’vi language, spoken by the indigenous population of Pandora in Avatar, has written a primer for the language.
Na’vi has 20 consonants, 7 vowels, 4 diphthongs, and 2 syllabic “pseudovowels,” rr and ll.

For truly keen Na’vi devotees, Frommer has said he will be writing about the language [...]

For instance WordPress becomes Word Press if camel-case compound words can be split apart. Alternatively WP could also be spelt as Wordpress.
When all the elements of a camel-case compound are words that could stand on their own, slice it open: Master Card, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Word Perfect. When some elements are letters or word [...]

Half of the world’s 6500 languages are expected to have vanished by the end of the century says Dr Mark Turin, of the University of Cambridge, who is embarking on a project to record as much as possible, of as many as possible, of the world’s threatened languages, in order to help preserve them.
“The [...]