Back in December, linguistics grad student Gretchen McCulloch analyzed joke variants on Benedict Cumberbatch's name to see what the underlying patterns are. She gave more statistical detail in a post...
My favorite Unicode character name is LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH SQUIRREL TAIL (U+A755). The character itself is pretty cool too. If you're viewing this page in one of the...
“Overhead he heard the tiny, unlubricated sound of a bat.” —Theodore Sturgeon, “Excalibur and the Atom,” 1951. Reading these old Sturgeon stories is reminding me that prose can unashamedly use...
I'm guessing most Americans know by now that the US Postal Service sells “Forever Stamps”; you buy a Forever Stamp at today's first-class one-ounce stamp price, and it will be...
The editor of the heavy metal website Invisible Oranges provides a guide to Death Metal English. A couple of sample translations from the article: Normal English: “Commuting to work” Death...
Half the people on my Facebook friends list have linked to an article by Megan Garber in the Atlantic titled “English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet,” about the growing...
Nice list of winners of Slate's 2012 Fake Robert Ludlum Title contest, along with notes on Salman Rushdie's Ludlumization of Shakespeare plays....
Uncle Dobe passed along a list of puns, many of which (to my surprise) I hadn't seen before, and some of which made me laugh out loud. Here's an abridged...
Someone mentioned the Emmy Awards the other day, and I realized I wasn't sure why they were called that. I figured they must have been named after some famous person...
Jackie pointed out (I'm paraphrasing) that we're now seeing bromance storylines with female characters. I did a quick Google for [female bromance], and found the following suggested terms: womance (pronounced...