Language Log

And on the eighth day, the Lord created the Language Log and said, yea, the internets are wonderful. Read it if you are interested in language, words, writing, etymology, or the debate between descriptivists and prescriptivists - a sort of undercard to the nature vs. nurture headline bout.

A sample of recent Language Log posts: actually-grammatical Bushisms, that ring tone that adults supposedly can't hear, the use of the word fizzing in soccer play-by-play, the problems with the Oxford English Corpus' attempt to catalog 21st-century English, how much Dan Brown sucks as a writer, Italian surnames (and Dan Brown's use or misuse of them), and "what an arbitrary bastard patchwork of a mess English actually is," and a "new" preposition ("outwith" - this one's for Elise). Highly recommended, in short.

(From the New York Times, via Kottke - which is a little bit ironic given the occasional misspellings efforts to ensure linguistic evolution.)