By Anne Curzan. If brr and brrr are already playable words in Scrabble, why not add grr? On May 21, Collins, the publisher of the Official Scrabble Wordlist, did just that. As announced on the Collins website: “Over 6,500 new words have been added to the Collins Official Scrabble Wordlist — influenced by all parts of life, including social media, slang, technology and food, plus English from around the world.” Although the words, including grr, won’tbe officially approved by the World English-Language Scrabble Players Association until September, the announcement made headlines within hours. Literally hours. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. My Lingua Franca colleage Anne Curzan recently published a post about recent additions to the official Scrabble dictionary, of which there have been a surprisingly large number. (I guess that’s the way they’ve found to keep on selling Scrabble dictionaries.) More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. We are all going to have to get used to the word metadata. Explaining what it means in simple terms is quite tricky, for it is a genuinely abstract concept. (And let me warn the purists up front that in this post I am going to be treating data not as the plural of the Latin word datum, but as an English singular noncount noun like air, fun, furniture, information, or water: I will say the data is stored, not the data are stored.) More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I’ve just returned from France, and the glow has not worn off. What glow, you ask? Would that be the long dinners over excellent wine, finished off with a plate of delectable stinky cheeses? The gilded sunsets over the Loire Valley? The newly refinished tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn, with their mysterious sixth sense. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. The summer I was 20, I hatched the insane plan of riding the moped I’d purchased at my job in France through England and Scotland and over to my mother’s ancestral home in Ireland. Various near-disasters ensued, not the least of them occasioned by my ignorance of a war that was then raging directly along my path through Northern Ireland. But the daily challenge was the rain. More...

By Ben Yagoda. Toward the end of NPR’s Planet Money podcast last week, the host, Jacob Goldstein, said: “You can tweet at us at ‘planetmoney.’ You can tweet at me at ‘jacobgoldstein.’” More...

By Ben Yagoda. Catching up on New Yorkers, I happened on a poem by John Koethe, which begins:

It’s a great poem, but, needless to say, what mainly interested me was Koethe’s use of covers band instead of cover band — to mean a musical combo whose repertoire consists of songs popularized by other performers. More...