And here's my favorite language-related stuff for June:

Verbivore's Feast: A Banquet of Word & Phrase Origins - Ecdysiast
The origin of ecydsiast, H.L. Mencken's hifalutin alternative to stripper.

Business Writing - Show Me the Manual!
An authority on business writing dismisses unsourced prescriptivism.

(There were some other good anti-prescriptivist posts this month: Bradshaw of the Future called a snob a snob, and at Off the Wall, Bruce Byfield described some typical reactions to his descriptivism. See if you can spot any of those in the comments on that BotF post.)

World Wide Words - Brownie points
Another interesting word history. I like the idea that its tangled etymology helped promulgate this expression.

Nobody's Business - Language Matters
From one of the libertarian blogs I follow comes a usage quibble I haven't encountered before: threat vs. risk. Non-libertarians might not care.

Cryptomundo - The Short History of Blobsquatch
So awesome. Loren Coleman of Cryptomundo traces the origin of blobsquatch, perhaps the best word I've learned this year. Blogsquatching, mentioned in this same post, is a close second.

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