I dig sports, so I was watching "Game of Thrones" on Home Box the other night and there was this part where a dude was being super-rude to a lady, but he was doing it in a Foreign Language from errbody else, so he thought he was slick. However, the person he was being rude to was the chick who has the fire-breathing dragons, and she came up hard, and she does not play. Spoiler alert. Aiieeee!

All the people on "Game of Thrones" pretty much speak the "Common Tongue" or whatever they call it on the show (if they call it anything) and nobody gets bent outta shape if [...]

You know what no one says on his death bed? "If only I could have snarked more from the sidelines."

— Chris Jones (@MySecondEmpire) June 6, 2012

"From the sidelines" is a sports term. "Cheering from the sidelines" can be a nice phrase. It means "I am rooting you on while watching you play." If we are not clothed in rags and eating from dumpsters on Sunday, we will be cheering on New York Marathon runners from the "sidelines," perhaps as they hop downed power lines along the shore after they cross the Verrazano.

But sometimes the "game" in question is a metaphor. And if you [...]

If you try to use booze to solve a problem, 
 One day you're gonna discover that you have two problems.1 It's one hell of a double act.2

People talk about the joy of sex, 
 But it don't last nothin' like shootin' anvils.3 When they lay you on the table, better keep your business clean.4 
If it’s out there, it’s in here.5

Show me a love story and I'll show you a tragedy.6 Eternal vigilance is where it’s at.7

Hitler 1 Kony 2 Anne Frank 3 Michele Bachmann 4 Ralph Sampson 5 "This Jeremy Lin Nigga" 6

Health care costs 7 Reproductive rights 8 Governance 9 SOPA 10 The rule of law 11 Dick 12

"Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones. A writer with a mind that doesn’t register how words are spelled tends to see through the words he encounters — straight to the things, characters, ideas, images and emotions they conjure. A good speller, by contrast — the kind who never fails to clock the idiosyncratic orthography of 'algorithm' or 'Albert Pujols' — tends to see language as a system. Good spellers are often drawn to poetry and wordplay, while bad spellers, for whom language is a conduit and not an end in itself, can excel at representation and reportage."

Recently, NPR aired the word "goddamned" again, this time in a quote from a Tom Cruise-in-character-as-Les Grossman appearance, and boy howdy is America upset about the taking of the Lord's name in vain. But don't worry, NPR's ombudsman (who is a woman! Which gives me pause that she should be opining on language usage!) is on the case. She writes: "I'm seeing the question through a different lens-one that is not based in the New York-Washington corridor, where this example of offensive language often goes in one ear and out the other." While it's surely true that in "real America" it is sometimes considered offensive to Christians to use [...]

A 49-year-old New Jersey woman is maybe losing the right to her license plate, which reads "BIOCH," because that is how you spell "bitch" with a Trenton [Tren'-en] accent. Her new license plate reads "WHAEVER," which is awesome. But really the most fabulous part of this wondrous story is the explanation from the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. Yes: "language is ever changing and evolving, especially in pop-culture. While a word may mean nothing today, it could have some sort of negative connotation years later."

The Dictionary of American Regional English is on hard times, and is asking for your support.

There is a gender wage gap.1 There is a real world.2 There is poop in your well.3

There is hope.4 There is a G-Spot.5 There is a Bob Hope.6

Regular folks can be taught to code.7 Black love still exists.8 Macy’s stock is a good value Even near highs.9

"Curation is replacing creation as a mode of self-expression." – Jonathan Harris @jjhnumber27 #creativemornings

— Tina Roth Eisenberg (@swissmiss) June 1, 2012

As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I'm fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it's not actually curation, or anything like it. Your faux TED talk is not going well for you if you are making some point about "curation" replacing "creation" because, well, for [...]

.bbpBox{background:url(http://a1.twimg.com/images/themes/theme14/bg.gif) #131516;padding:20px;}

Would people stop calling me uneducated it offends my muthafuckin alma mater Hunter College.Thu Oct 20 00:21:55 via Twitter for iPadEllen BarkinEllenBarkin

Profanity is alive and well on Twitter, except in Utah, apparently. You'd expect heathen citydwellers to swear, and we do not disappoint, but the Bible belt is pretty foul-mouthed too (no word whether language there trended cleaner on Sundays). Thanks to tweets, blog comments and unlocked Facebook feeds, we know more than ever before about the way regular people—in New York, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, and [...]

Female bonobo: "Oh my god, have you been to the new kiwi place?!" Male bonobo [looks up from piece of bark he's perusing]: "You mean the kiwi tree?" Female bonobo: "Yeah." Male bonobo: "No. I heard about it, though. Sifton liked it, I think. It's good?" Female bonobo: "It's not just good. It's excellent! Male bonobo: "Ha! Boogie Nights." Female: "Seriously, though. You have to go. They have the best kiwis."

This is a couple of weeks old, but as linguistic prescription seems to be the theme of the day, we might as well go with it: British comedian (and recent mugging victim) David Mitchell provides some instruction of proper usage. (If you are unfamiliar with Mitchell, he is one of the most interesting comedians working today. Co-star of the popular British sitcom "Peep Show" with his comedy partner Robert Webb, he is also responsible for "That Mitchell and Webb Look," which can be seen on BBC America. I'm including my favorite skit from the show below as a bonus.) If you enjoy this, here's the channel [...]

Here's an interesting article about the problems caused by Internet spam filters. The piece starts out by discussing Canadian history journal The Beaver, which has been forced to change its name because its current moniker causes it to run afoul of online content blockers. (The magazine will henceforth be called Hot Wet Pussy Review.) But it also provides a history of the issue, notably the so-called "Scunthorpe problem" of 1996, wherein residents of a British locality were "initially banned from registering with internet service provider AOL because the town's name contained an obscenity." (The town was named Dripping Snatch Village.) But why does the problem persist to this [...]

For witches.1 For vampires once they're staked or burned.2 For the Halloween spoilers.3 For puppeteers like Paxton.4

For the systems integrators.5

For a number of Federal court judges, As I am sure there will be for Members of Congress.6 For non-disabled drivers who sport a handicapped placard on the dash And park free all day at a downtown metered spot.7

I have always thought of the word 'literally' as someone else's problem. Then, suddenly, it arrived: My summer of Literally. A recent family vacation revealed my brother as one of the worst offenders. He likes to couple ‘literally’ with the phrase… 'on the planet,' as in, “You are literally the best sister on the planet.” (Or rather, you were.) Other literally fans (is it the heat?): my lesbian best friend, my rich best friend, my yoga best friend—she’s the one it seems rudest to complain about since last weekend we went to Wanderlust together, and I spent half the time in a sobbing rage and the other half crawling around [...]

"If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round in the supposed clash between 'prescriptivist' and 'descriptivist' theories of language. This pseudo-controversy, a staple of literary magazines for decades, was ginned up again this month by The New Yorker, which has something of a history with the bogus battle."

In an interview with Martha Stewart shortly before her 2003 indictment, Jeffrey Toobin asked the visibly exhausted celebrity if she felt herself the victim of “schadenfreude.” He didn't expand upon the Germanism, and Stewart certainly didn't need it defined.

Schadenfreude? I asked. “That's the word,” she said. “I hear that, like, every day.” And she added, in her precise way, “Do you know how to spell it?”

While spelling the thing might be an issue, writers assume nowadays that when they say “schadenfreude,” readers know exactly what they mean. It’s defined as the “malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others” in the OED, which first included the word [...]

For a while now, something has been bothering me. It's not particularly menacing or sinister, just annoying and unavoidable. It's a word, and I see it in the comments section of YouTube videos and hear it from the mouths of guffawing teenage girls next to me on the subway. Sometimes it even makes an unwelcome appearance on my cell phone in the form of a text message. The word I'm talking about is random—and I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Facebook Groups have risen in opposition to this ubiquitous six-letter expression. There is "Irritated by the incorrect use of the word 'random,'" "I HATE the word [...]

Sad news: the International Federation of Association Football (known as FIFA, because of some French thing), the governing body of international soccer (a game played with a ball and two nets in which the use of hands is restricted) has denied reports that it issued a list of 20 English profanities to World Cup referees in advance of the big tournament that is start sometime soon, apparently. I say the news is sad because I would love to see an official list of English profanities: "Motherfucker" and "cocksucker" now seem rather wan to me, due to overuse. I need a few good new curse words to really spice [...]