For the past 33 years, the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, directed since its inception by current New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, has brought together the nation’s leading crossword solvers, constructors, and aficionados for a weekend of competition and camaraderie.

I attended and competed in last weekend’s tournament …

… all are words deserving banishment from the English language, according to the word mavens at Lake Superior State University.

Read on for others on their “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.”

When Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at President Obama earlier this year, it offended many of his colleagues in Congress, who sought a way to express their displeasure.

But they didn’t warn or rebuke Wilson; no, they “admonished” him, and news reports about it sent millions running for their trusty dictionaries to find out what on earth the word meant.

Merriam-Webster (a subsidiary of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.) has just released the list of the some 100 new words added to its Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

Click below for a sampling of this list, and see how many of the words you’ve heard of …

This “millionth word” business is the creation of something called the Global Language Monitor, an organization that, judging by its website, exists chiefly to attract media attention.

The interested reader can easily discover why this particular claim to our attention is pure buncombe, beginning with the fact (conceded on the website’s FAQ) that there is no simple and generally accepted definition of what a “word” is, and the further fact that there is no simple and generally accepted criterion for when a word is an “English” one.

Here’s the hilarious Rowan Atkinson as the acerbic “molder of young minds.”

Each Saturday we highlight a humorous and sometimes poignant video, interview, comic, or skit concerning different careers, past and present. From W.C. Fields to Rowan Atkinson, classic cartoons and commercials to Monty Python—all and everything will be tapped for this look each week at various professions and pastimes (loosely defined).

Click here for all of the videos and careers highlighted to date.

Austin, Texas June 10, 2009 – “The Global Language Monitor today announced that ‘Web 2.0′ has bested ‘Jai Ho,’ ‘Noob’ and ‘Slumdog’ as the 1,000,000th English word or phrase added to the codex of the fourteen hundred-year-old language.”

Linguists have roundly criticized this notion that words can actually be monitored this way …

One of the contributors to the Language Log blog (motto: “On the Language Log blog, nobody knows you’re a dog”) has performed the invaluable service of fact-checking a couple of leading pundits:

George Will and Stanley Fish.

It’s a refreshing reminder that facts matter, and that the pleasing expression of opinion, no less than the irksome one, is pernicious if not founded on them.

How many words are there in the English language?

Some sources, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, say 600,000.

A grander vision holds that along about now, the lexicon will have swelled (swole?) to a million.

Read on …

Every year around Mother’s Day the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) releases its list of the most popular names given to babies in the previous year.

It’s an invaluable resource for prospective parents, who may not want to saddle their child with a name shared by multiple others in her preschool class.

But for the rest of us, it’s also a fascinating glimpse at a set of cultural trends that, like few others, aren’t under the sway of commercial interests.