'Baby bump', 'Man cave' make banned words list http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/story/2011-12-30/banned-words-list/52287668/1 Don't let these words occupy your vocabulary in 2012 http://goo.gl/cW3jb Lake Superior State University: Banished Words List http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current.php Word Warriors' 2012 Top 10 http://www.wordwarriors.wayne.edu/2011/ A Dictionary of the...

Have you ever encountered a bloat of hippos or a charm of finches? This entertaining website, created by researcher and educator Melissa Kaplan, provides various descriptive terms for an extensive list of animals. Part 1 of the site contains plurals, collective nouns, and words for sounds, gender, and offspring. For example, a female kangaroo is a flyer, and a young swan is cygnet. Part 2 offers...

Drawing on information collected during the 2000 Census, this latest brief from the Census Bureau looks on language use and English-speaking ability across the country. Authored by Hyon B. Shin and Rosalind Bruno, this 11-page report begins with a brief discussion of the questions asked about language use on the 2000 Census reporting form. The initial findings include the fact that approximately...

While the phrase "never say never" may make some think of a certain suave British spy of the silver screen, to wordsmiths this is a thoroughly noxious example of an oxymoron. Strictly speaking, an oxymoron is a literary figure of speech in which opposite or contradictory words, terms, phrases or ideas are combined to create a rhetorical effect by paradoxical means. For those with a budding love of...

Words are used as invectives, toasts, and tirades, among other forms of human expression. As a type of artistic experiment, Jonathan Harris of Flaming Toast Productions decided to create this engaging website that documents the 86,000 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Nay-sayers beware: This is no simple listing of the words, contained within a mundane series of...