"This post isn’t really about Scrabble. It’s about taking a load of ugly data and hacking around with some scripts to refine it into something I can commit to memory. Then its about Scrabble. Winning at Scrabble."

"While canoeing on the Rifle River in Michigan, Boomer fell overboard letting forth a fuck or two. As if his day wasn't bad enough, the nearby sheriff gave him a ticket ... for violating an 1897 statute forbidding cursing within earshot of women and children. Then he was convicted.

"Amazed that this could happen in the twenty-first century, my curiosity about the legal implications of fuck was rekindled. I decided to dedicate one of my research assistants to exploring the area."

"In other words, your ears aren't deceiving you: Spaniards really do sprint and Chinese really do stroll, but they will tell you the same story in the same span of time."

"Today Ken and I want to talk about a different kind of special sentence, one that is self-defeating. A self-defeating sentence is one that ensures it cannot achieve its desired end, which in this instance is to illustrate a self-defeating sentence."

"One of the interesting things that sets even superficially similiar genres of music apart is their lyrical content. Last.fm tags can overlap to a great degree, but we were interested to see what the words can tell you about the subtler shades of meaning that go along with those tags. As usual around here, the best way to answer questions like these is by asking the data."

"We've lived with and loved the distinctly 'web 2.0' design for a while now and it's done us proud. However, time's moved on, and in autumn last year we decided it was time to resurrect the project."

"Since September 27, 2007, I have been documenting the graffiti left in public study areas in the Joseph Regenstein Library ("the Reg"): the study nooks tucked into the stacks, the whiteboards in the all-night study space, and the study carrels in the reading rooms."

"My subject line said (in full), 'meep.' The body said (in full), 'Meep.' Yesterday I received a reply email from Assistant Principal Mark Strout, which said (in full) "Your E-mail has been forwarded to the Danvers Police Department."

"There’s been lots of great stuff written about why singular they is acceptable, but every time I want to smash the arguments against it, I have to waste time jumping through old Language Log posts and books and whatnot, so I figured I’d finally go about summarizing it all. Without further ado, here’s the evidence for singular they, and why you ought to stop “correcting” it."

"We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online. This is the second post of our statistical investigation into the optimal online dating message; a note about how we protected user privacy is here."

"The moral is that the brevity of an e-mail message, a blog post, a text message, even a tweet, is no obstacle to powerful information, a persuasive argument, a literary moment, a zinger, a joke."

"Certainly not! That’s the beauty of our approach! Machine translation has never been “Artificial Intelligence”—that’s where your natural language intelligence is sorely needed! Five centuries of “papers” make a truly enormous bulk of machine-searchable material. The Semantic Web has made profound advances! So today our stochastic ontological schemata have dissolved hundreds of so-called “scientific disciplines,” and their millions of paper “journals,” into one vast Google-soup of navigable, searchable, ontologically linkable “language product.”"

"Just as I was withdrawing money in a bank lobby, my 5-year-old daughter chose to throw a temper tantrum, screaming and writhing on the floor while a couple of elderly ladies looked on in disgust. (Their children, apparently, had been perfect.) I gave Dorothy a disappointed look and said, 'That argument won’t work, sweetheart. It isn’t pathetic enough.' She blinked a couple of times and picked herself up off the floor, pouting but quiet. "

"If you set your Google SafeSearch filter on "strict filtering" and search for clitoris, you get zero returns. But if you try a Google SafeSearch "strict filtering" search for penis, you get... 33,000,000 returns."

"What do we sing about, when we sing about the body? The chart below, based on a sample of thousands songs, tells the story. The size of a circle corresponds to how often that part is mentioned in each genre. Click on a genre name to see a close-up that shows exactly what words were used."

"We used to tease and say "1-2-many" is how baboons count. So, imagine my puzzlement when I saw that there are... well... humans living by a similar system! Here we are wielding the Power of the Universe (maths) as if it is nothing... and others are still

"In reality, the number of words depends on the definitions of Eskimo and snow, and on the method of counting numbers of words in languages that have quite different grammatical structures from English."

"This "Wiki" is a catalogue of the tricks of the trade for writing scripts. We dip into the cauldron of story and place it in front of you to read."

"I mean, it's not just a question of neither being pleased about Mr. Long's choice of verb form nor not pleased; we are talking about a deep and unbounded apathy here, a cosmically profound level of apathy down to which few people's refusal to give a monk

"And this particular form of sexual dimorphism is apparently not shared with our relatives the chimps and gorillas, so it must have evolved during the same period that human speech and language did."

"If you are an old-media kind of reader, "meh" won't mean a whole lot to you. The word has appeared in the national press three times in the past year. If you gain new vocabulary from conversation, it is probably unfamiliar."

"The Taxonomy is more useful than the alphabetical index for studying the logical relationships between fallacies."

Marain's principle symbols are based around a three-by-three grid, which is itself a diagrammatic representation of a nine-digit binary number, or byte, it being intended from the start that the language could be rendered into binary code as informational

My favourite webcomic.

An online English <> Scots dictionart

A great source for street /internet/etc slang definitions.

The history (and potential futures?) of catmacros.

"John Reid ... I no longer think of a thousand words. I think of one."

i am in ur dictionaries, verbing ur nounz

A very large list of palindromes. Might come in handy some day.. possibly maybe..

"The author and translators disclaim all responsibility for the results of use of these expressions under field conditions. Use in a well-ventilated area. Do not expose to open flame. No user-serviceable parts inside. If swallowed, do not induce vomiting.

The history of some Shakespearean ''misquotations".

"It cost too much, staying human." - Bruce Sterling

"Then something happened. My brain remapped. My speech returned."

Combining the Margaret Thatcher effect and the McGurk effect to make the McThatcher effect.

Very handy tip on common mistakes in word and phrase usage.

If you want to craft an error-free message that reflects your professionalism, be on the lookout for these common grammatical slip-ups.

Details about the languages of the world, past and present.