The most ravenously picked apart teenage digital trail in the history of American terrorism got picked apart again Wednesday afternoon: If you unravel the criminal complaint against Tsarnaev's fellow 19-year-old friend, you'll find an instantly historic LOL. But LOL has lost its historical significance, and everybody needs to calm down with their investigative linguistics.
The most powerful state of emptiness in the written word is the humble space. Let us pause and honor it for a moment, as this particular moment provides us with yet another reminder of why we need the space so.
That faint sound you hear is Senate reporters from the AP, The New York Times, and beyond smacking their delete keys, rethinking their agenda setting aloud, and figuring out how we talk now, amidst a serious legislative discussion
Google recently got into a row with the Swedish Language Council over a new word in its official language: "ogooglebar" which means "ungoogleable." Google complained about the word, which the council then deleted from the Swedish language.
Saturday is a big day. OK, the expression, is turning 174.
Mexico's Supreme Court narrowed that country's allowable speech yesterday, determining in a 3-2 vote that two Spanish-language insults used to disparage homosexuals were not protected under freedom of expression laws.
The misused word is everywhere, proliferating like fruit flies 'round a bowl of rotting bananas. We must stop it before it goes too far.
We have reached Peak "Phablet": This week the term for the popular (and quite awkward) devices was called "horrible," "stupid," and "worst word of the year" (to which we're about two weeks in). Even linguists agree.
Discovered: Global warming could cause more lava flow; humans started popping pills ages ago; babies begin acquiring language in womb; Mars astronauts would be very sleepy.
"Fiscal cliff," "spoiler alert," and "trending" beware: Michigan's Lake Superior State University has issued their list for the 38th year in a row.
As a fascinating phenomenon of modern tech-speak emerges — the verb "to Google" has now been translated into many other languages — we've compiled a handy traveler's guide.
Here's your semantic government news that reads a bit like an Onion article of the day. But what's it all about, really?
What happens when one NYU student replies to 39,978 others? Things go nuts, on TV, the Internet, and the world, and so on. Now it's transitioned into a handy anecdote on the state of how to use email.
Tuesday evening we went down the old presidential debate road yet again, meeting our candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama for a second time with all the convivial discourse-ready trappings of America.
Why are so many American writers using expressions like bumbling toff, fortnight, and lovely piece of kit—why, possibly worse, are words like crikey, loo, cheers, brilliant, flat, twee, ginger, whinge, sot, rubbish, and so on "Anglocreeping" their way through our country's vernacular?
The New York Times' After Deadline blog has a noteworthy semantical discussion today in light of the presidential debates and all the fact-checking and talking about fact-checking that's guaranteed to keep happening until the election on November 6, and maybe afterward, too. Let us count the ways in which we incorrectly use the word fact.
The emoticon is old. Or, young, 30 years young! Either way, it's a bona fide grown-up symbol now, with the life experience under its lack of a belt (for it has no waist) to prove it.
Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast is always a font of linguistic information, but today's is particularly fun, more rebellious, you might say, than usual. It's not like we get to dissect a vulgarity or semi-vulgarity in a linguistic way every day!
If the frequency of word usage "related to moral excellence and virtue" in the Google Books archive is to be believed, America is in a steep moral decline.
Last week I wrote of a shift that's occurring in gendered pronouns: More she and her, less pronoun domination by he and him, as per a recent study from a professor at San Diego State. Today, we take on the I. And me. And you, too.
Researchers have been tracking pronouns by gender to see what shifts in our use of these tiny little words says about larger views of women in society.
Of course you know autocorrect. You've probably found yourself a target of its accidentally rude, crude expressions at least once, possibly with unfortunate ends, sometimes with amusing ones.
There is a very important question being tackled again by certain smart people of the Internet, and that question is this: What, exactly, is the worst word on the entire planet?
There's an amusing screed from New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris on the magazine's website on the subject of swear words.
Only hours before Nicki Minaj was scheduled to perform at Hot 97's Summer Jam concert, The Twitters blew up with the news that the chart-topping, neon-beehive-wig-wearing M.C. would not show.
Just in time for Geek Pride day, some folks on the Internet have started to get a little defensive over the term "geek," as they should, since lots of official language arbiters still consider it a derogatory term.
Today in studies that claim the Internet is ruining our lives, the BBC informs us that auto-correct and spellcheckers have turned us into a bunch of illiterate idiots.
When we tried chilling out on our email exclamation mark usage, in an attempt to wean ourselves off our addiction, we noticed some other punctuation crutches we've developed.
In this week's New Yorker we learn of two competing schools of language scholars: The stodgy, old-school prescriptivists, who think there should be set rules for speaking and writing English, and the more liberal descriptivists, who aim to describe rather than dictate how we should speak.
They call it the Grass Mud-Horse lexicon, and, lucky for us language lovers, the China Digital Times just started a recurring word of the week feature to go along with its catalog of the slang China's bloggers use to subvert government censorship.
This weekend's New York Times crossword puzzle has sparked a linguistic debate: What does the word "illin'" mean?
It turns out vocal fry, what the Internet is reporting as a new linguistic trend "creeping" into women's speech isn't much of a trend at all.
Contrary to all the LOLs, emoticons and hashtags happening in feeds across the Twittersphere, Twitter isn't destroying the English language.
Two weeks after quake, a series of Twitter puns is getting laughs in Japan
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