There've been an unusual amount of real estate marketing materials to proofread lately — my job for the past few weeks has essentially been removing anything that references the ADS Word of the Year — and so I haven't gotten around to making one of these linky lists.

Until now! Here's some especially good stuff from this past month:

Bremer Sprachblog - Netzplauderei
Over at the German-language Bremer Sprachblog, Herr Stefanowitsch criticizes a proposal by the Anglicism Hunters to replace chatten with netzplaudern. His shocking premise? Speakers are, by and large, not dumb.

Calvin and Hobbes - I like to verb words
The famous comic from back in the day. (Note that Calvin's final quote is three words, not four.)

The Lexicographer's Rules - The Real History and Origin of Woot and w00t
Your definitive guide to the M-W Word of the Year. For the definitive dissent to the M-W selection, head over to Errata.

The Guardian - From albedo to zugunruhe
A nice personal essay on one reader's decision to look up unfamiliar words. (Though it continues to bother me that sesquipedality is discussed here as if it had the adjective sense of sesquipedalian. It's a noun.)

Linguism - Dictionary Writers
Over at Linguism, some amusing definitions from actual dictionaries.

Twitter - emckean
Lexicographer Erin McKean's "word of the day" Twitter page. The words tend towards the wonderfully obscure.

Austro-Athenian Empire - Stating the Obvious
This blog usually covers political issues, but this guest post by Jennifer McKitrick argues (quite convincingly) that we've been overusing the word obviously.

Labels: links