It’s hot, it’s Friday, and chances are you don’t feel like working. So take a few minutes and read our language blog roundup, in which we bring you the week’s highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news.

Ben Zimmer returned to The New York Times this week with a piece about the computational analysis of the jargon of novels and other fiction texts, as well as a roundup of the various linguistic analysis tools available.

Mr. Zimmer also wrote about the +1 paradigm while Mark Liberman at Language Log pointed out Google +’s singular their issue and Stan Carey discussed the problems with pronouns in general.  Meanwhile, a different PloS One offered an interesting academic paper, Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity.

Perhaps some swearing was done during the still-continuing debate over “irritating” Americanisms.  Lynneguist posted part three of her reaction; Motivated Grammar was outraged over the outrage over “I’m good”; and even The New Yorker got in on the action with a British point of view.

Peeving against language peevers continued with David Crystal’s post on Marley and Me versus Marley and I.  John E. McIntyre had a word about restive, dictionaries, the Myths of the Golden Age and Ideal English, and the modern meaning of transpire versus its original Latin parts (trans-, across, plus –spire, breathe), while Robert Lane Greene at Johnson gave his two cents with a post about etymological fallacy, stating that a “word need not mean exactly what its Greek and Latin roots once literally meant.”

In the news, Language Log noticed Satan sandwich (want Lucifer fries with that?) and the oxymoron of the week, divided consensus, while Michael Rundell at Macmillan Dictionary blog questioned Ruport Murdoch’s apology (or fauxpology?).

Remember that row over speaking Welsh, or not speaking in Welsh, in a Welsh-speaking village pub?  Well, the pro-Welsh fight continues with “proposals to make Welsh and English the official languages of the Welsh assembly” and a new bill requiring that the assembly “publish a bilingual services scheme.”  In Alaska “Tlingit speakers and educators are fighting to keep” that indigenous language alive, while “along the Atlantic coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia,” Gullah and other non-English native languages threaten to disappear.  In the UK, immigrants may lose access to English classes due to budget cuts, while in New York City, a multi-media artist has undertaken the experiment of teaching English at the laundromat.

Grammarphobia parsed out the difference between yeah, yea, and yay, and Stan Carey explained that, which, who, and whom.  Dialect Blog dialogued on the General American English accent, and when price and prize don’t rhyme.  Lynneguist blogged on a Ben Zimmer-suggested topic, nous, used in British-English to mean “common sense, practical intelligence,” and some American-English equivalents (gumption, horse sense, the sense God gave. . .).

Word Spy spied silent soccer, “a form of soccer in which spectators are not allowed to yell, cheer, or coach from the sidelines,” and juvenoia, “the baseless and exaggerated fear that the Internet and current social trends are having negative effects on children.”  Lexiophiles pondered the most recognized word in the world (ok?) while The Baby Name Wizard took a linguistic approach to the changing trends in girls’ names. The NYT Sunday Book Review served up 12 favorite snacks of famous authors while Publishers’ Weekly shared the 12 weirdest author deaths (look out for that eagle! I mean, that turtle! look out for that eagle and that turtle!).

Motivated Grammar unveiled SeeTweet, a way to geographically map Twitter search terms (try it, it’s fun!), and Mighty Red Pen alerted us about some wonderfully geeky T-shirts from Arrant Pedantry.

Finally, poet Charles Simic mused on the lost art of postcard writing:

unlike letters, cards require a verbal concision that can rise to high level of eloquence: brief and heart-breaking glimpses into someone’s existence, in addition to countless amusing and well-told anecdotes.

So if you’re on vacation, take a few minutes and send your friends a postcard.  Who knows, it may end up as a lost bookmark.

[And a brief plug for Wordnik-related language news — if you (or your favorite humanzee) missed our Words of the Week in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, you can catch up with them here.]

Is it Friday already? Why yes it is. This language blog roundup’s on us.

Last week we linked to a BBC piece about the high cost of spelling mistakes.  This week The New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan wrote about the price of typos and the difference between good and bad spellers: “Good spellers are often drawn to poetry and wordplay, while bad spellers, for whom language is a conduit and not an end in itself, can excel at representation and reportage.”

In News of the World news, a few words dominated, including flame-haired (though Johnson wished it didn’t), hackergate, foam pie, and tiger wife (not to be confused with tiger mother or trophy wife).

Meanwhile, there was much hubbub over another piece published last week on supposedly irritating Americanisms (or irritating supposed Americanisms?). Language Log had one or two things to say about it, as did Johnson, The Economist’s language blog; John McIntyre at the Baltimore Sun; and Lynneguist at Separated by a Common Language (though at first Lynneguist resisted and wrote about baby teeth versus milk teeth instead).

In more Britishisms versus Americanisms, Jan Freeman at The Boston Globe talked pants, while Vickie Hollett at the Macmillan Dictionary Blog explored the British and American differences in small talk, including Americans’ skill at saying goodbye. Stan Carey saw no sense in an academy of English and discussed an Irish stereotype.

Johnson took on phobias and the “gay” accent, and the Dialect Blog wrote about the cloth set, the Philadelphia accent, and childrens’ accents. Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley, freshmen are being recorded for an “Internet-based experiment to map and match accents from across the state and world.”

Fully (sic) unpeeled some banana terms while Arnold Zwicky served up some fake Italian foods.  Kai von Fintel at Language Log wondered why tasty means something that tastes good while smelly means something that smells bad, and New Scientist reported on studies that suggest people seem to instinctively “link certain sounds with particular sensory perceptions.”

Christopher Muther at the Boston Globe considered what may be the literally most misused word in the English language; Michael Rundell at Macmillan Dictionary Blog pondered it’s and its; and K International examined irregular verbs.  Motivated Grammar hashed out all of a sudden versus all of the sudden, and reviewed Write More Good, the new book by The Bureau Chiefs, the same folks behind the Fake AP Stylebook.

In other news, this week the Devil’s Dictionary turned 100.  The satirical lexicon incorporates “whimsy, existential pessimism, cheap puns, sex jokes, and just about every other trick in the comedian’s book.”  Nerve listed the “Ten Greatest Lists in the History of Western Civilization,” while Open Culture offered an impressionist’s impressions of Shakespeare.  In Alaska the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics got started, including a storytelling event, while the Washington Post challenged readers to come up with the best name for the current heat wave (we like the Big Schvitz).

Finally, while this past weekend’s carmageddon in Los Angeles may have been much ado about nothing, it did yield the portmanteau of a portmanteau of the week: plankmageddon (seeing is believing).

Until next week, take care. It’s been nice talking to you. Catch you later.

It’s Friday and you know what that means: it’s time for our weekly language blog roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news.

Monday was E.B. White’s birthday, and Open Culture celebrated with this sweet, sad animated film based on one of White’s short stories.  Another famous author in the news this week was Jane Austen, whose manuscript for an unpublished novel, The Watsons, sold for $1.6 million (Sir Naipaul, any comments?).

This week we learned that English is, among other things, a shameless whore and a magpie, “forever picking up shiny things.”  We learned of some culture-bound syndromes like amok and old hag syndrome; the three most common uses of irony; and nine words we’re probably confusing with other words.

We considered the douchebag, the difference between tot moms and baby mamas, and mouth-filled speech. We looked at some irritating Americanisms, pictures of Manhattanhenge, and the high cost of spelling mistakes.

The Macmillan Dictionary Blog provided guidance on the British Library’s dialectal wordbank, and told us about “not exactly” as a polite-ism in British conversation.  The Economist’s language blog Johnson was surprised the NSA style guide was sort of hippie-ish, and assured us that being an antichrist isn’t the same as being the devil.

The Virtual Linguist told us about glamour and it girls, while Dan Jurafsky at The Language of Food gave us a history and language lesson on ice cream.  Stan Carey posted about comic book grammar and canine comprehension, while Arnold Zwicky wrote about the “indecency” of the slut and the uterus, and what exactly is the plural of portmanteau (psst, it’s portmanteaus).

Motivated Grammar wondered is it +1’d or +1ed (or perhaps we should call the whole thing off), while Word Spy spotted elderburbia, “suburbs that have a predominantly elderly population,” and singlism, “workplace discrimination against employees who are single; the negative stereotyping of single people.”

The Dialect Blog discussed the hippie dialect (far out, man!); the Ocracoke brogue of the remote islands off of North Carolina, “sometimes mentioned as one of the ‘last living relatives’ of Elizabethan or Early Modern English”; the three types of Australian accents; and Jamaican patois and the English schwa. Literal-Minded explored the ordering of adjectives, while K International mused on the translation of foreign store signage, teaching language with Twitter, and a perhaps more natural way of speaking with cars (KITT, can you hear me?).

Finally, we’d like to end this week’s roundup with this lovely video about a secret bookstore in New York.

That’s it for this week.  Till next time, peace out, you hepcats.

Happy Friday before Fourth of July! It’s time again for another Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news.

There was much hubbub in the Twitterverse this week over the loss of the Oxford comma, as stated in the University of Oxford’s style guide. However, it was soon determined that the Oxford comma wasn’t dead after all, and that the “only explicit permission to dispense with the Oxford comma. . .was in a guide for university staff on writing press releases and internal communications.” Whew! We’re calm, cool, and collected now.

In Shakespeare news, a group of scientists got the green light from the Church of England to exhume “the Bard of Avon’s remains to determine the cause of his death and, among other things, if the playwright had traces of pot pumping through his system.”  Meanwhile in politics, Vanity Fair desconstructed Michele Bachmann’s favorite metaphor, the three-legged stool.

Erin Gloria Ryan over at Jezebel wrote about her love affair with peppering her speech with “like” while Mark Liberman at Language Log questioned Ryan’s proposal that women may use “like” more often than men, and jokingly devised a possible solution, the iPeeve, an imaginary app that is “a speech recognizer with a style checker [that] will make [your smartphone] vibrate (or beep, or flash) whenever you indulge in any of the verbal tics that you’ve asked it to watch out for.”

In neologism news, The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, noticed incent, the verb form of incentive, while Stan Carey mused over preloved euphemisms.  Word Spy spotted omega male, “the man who is least likely to take on a dominant role in a social or professional situation”; teacup, “a college student with a fragile, easily shattered psyche”; and filter bubble, “search results, recommendations, and other online data that have been filtered to match your interests, thus preventing you from seeing data outside of those interests.”

But the unmapped word of the week, in our humble opinion, was humblebrag (brought to our attention by @mcintyrekm), a “type of bragging which masks the brag in a faux-humble guise.”

The Virtual Linguist took a look at “once every preston guild,” a Lancashire expression meaning “very rarely”; down, meaning “an area of high land”; a now-troubling word that once simply meant a “bundle of sticks”; and The Daily Mail’s taking Kate Middleton to task for using ‘till instead of ‘til in her wedding thank you cards.  The Dialect Blog discussed the ever elusive English schwa; David Marsh at The Guardian demanded the termination of “railspeak”; and LeVar Burton is apparently “actively plotting” a “Rainbow Reading flashmob.”  Empirical Zeal blogged about dissecting the language of songbirds, while Buzzfeed cited a very British headline that is positively for the birds.

In library news, the Internet Archive announced that their eBook lending program has expanded to 1,000 libraries in six countries. Congrats! Meanwhile, George Mason University is busy archiving the world’s English accents.

The Book Haven at Stanford University profiled the exiled Chinese poet, Bei Dao, who stated that “each language keeps the secret code of a culture,” which may be just another reason to preserve endangered and disappearing languages such as Calo, “spoken by Romani people, sometimes referred to as Gypsies, in Spain”; Ayapanec, “which is thought to have descended from a language spoken by the Olmecs, a pre-Columbian civilization”; Eyak, “once spoken by a native tribe in Alaska”; and Kapampangan, a regional language in the Philippines, which may be preserved by “teenagers [who] think it’s ‘cool’ to send mobile phone text messages” in that language.

In videos of the week, check out this one from the Getty Museum about the structure of a medieval manuscript, and this thoroughly entertaining 10-minute history of the English language from Open University, brought to our attention by @MisterVerb via @Fritinancy.  Don’t have 10 minutes? Then at least check out chapter 7, the Age of the Dictionary.

Finally, happy Canada Day to our friends north of the border!  One Canadian living in Wales grieved the loss of her Canadian English, while our list of the day celebrates Canadianisms, and this one and this one honor Canadian places.

Till (or til?) next week, stay wordy my friends!