A few pointers from Tim Harford on writing non-fiction:
At the moment, having done much of my research, I’m trying to do 300 words every day as a minimum. This low target means that no matter what other commitments I have, I have no excuse not to skim through what I wrote yesterday and add [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I know we’re sick to death of the hype and non-stop chatter surrounding new Apple iPad, so I’ll try and be brief, but the furore over the name quite frankly has me puzzled.
It seems Apple has shown very poor judgement in including the word “pad” in the name of their new product, but I can’t [...]

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 [...]

The last ten years have spawned quite an array of new words and phrases.
These words and expressions were all coined in particular parts of the world in specific years: they’re principally slang and jargon; catching on, but still waiting to be formalised into our dictionaries.

The social networks have birthed a new official word – unfriend – being the act of removing someone from your friends list on a site like Facebook or MySpace.
“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is [...]

Differing circumstances and outlooks affect the way people describe life, with most using the word “journey” to sum up the experience.
The responses … were provided to participants and are well-known life metaphors from Western culture. For example, life as a journey is from Homer’s Odyssey (and the Epic of Gilgamesh should also be credited as [...]

Dissecting the origins and evolution of langauges, a presentation from last week’s Ignite Sydney event, by Google developer Pamela Fox.
English is particularly well known for borrowing words, with about 75% of our words coming from other languages – though mostly in the same indo european family. You could almost think of English as a language [...]