"Of the natural problems we face every day, very few have concrete solutions. But with a puzzle, you have that feeling of completion, which is very satisfying. You have not a solution but the perfect solution."

Life Magazine: Where Cliches Come From

FYI: OMG and LOL are now in the Oxford English Dictionary.
TMI and BFF are already in there.

German minister bans "der laptop"

Ten tips for writing Thank You notes.

Merriam-Webster has chosen "Austerity" as the Word of the Year.
The choice is based on the number of times a word is looked up in M-W's on-line dictionary.

Austerity is defined as "the quality or state of being austere" and "enforced or extreme economey"

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher (1889-1951)

Ten new words added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

from an article in AARP Magazine:

Researchers at the University of California--San Diego recently found that, on average, Americans hear, see, or read 34 giga-bytes worth of information a day--about 100,000 words--from TV, the Internet, books, radio, newspapers, and other sources.

It was on this day in 1754 that the word "serendipity" was first coined. It's defined by Merriam-Webster as "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for." It was recently listed by a U.K. translation company as one of the English language's 10 most difficult words to translate. Other words to make their list include plenipotentiary, gobbledegook, poppycock, whimsy, spam, and kitsch.

The invention of many wonderful things have been attributed to "serendipity," including Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Charles Goodyear's vulcanization of rubber, penicillin, inkjet printers, Silly Putty, the Slinky, and chocolate chip cookies.

According to the American Dialect Society,

the word of the year was "tweet"
the word of the decade was "google"
the most outrageous word was "death panel"
and the most creative word was "Dracula sneeze"

The word "set" has the largest number of meanings -- the Oxford English Dictionary has 26 pages devoted to this little three-letter word.

"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
"When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."

What was the 2008 "Word of the Year"?

Where did the word "maverick" originate?

Here is a man who read the entire UNABRIDGED Oxford English Dictionary!That's almost 22,000 pages in 20 volumes. It took him a year.

Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year 2006

From Aunt Lois, comes this story:

I came across this phrase in a book yesterday "FENDER SKIRTS".

A term I haven't heard in a long time and thinking about "fender skirts"

A Boston carpenter just set a new record for the most points scored on one word in an official game of Scrabble. The word was QUIXOTRY (exceedingly idealistic; unrealistic and impractical) and he got so many points because he used the high-value Q, X,

Laurence Urdell, former editor of the Random House Dictionary, became tired of standing in line in alphabetical order because he was always down near the end. To remedy this he coined the word zybetical which would list the letters in the reverse or

This week, my Word-of-the-Day is featuring slang terms that can be traced to specific languages. I was surprised to read the following:

This week's theme: slang/informal terms.
skosh (skosh) noun
A small amount; a little bit.