While adults are just starting to notice, usually with disapproval, "fail" used as a noun (as in "That's an epic fail."), my students are already racing ahead and converting it to an adjective.

We can tell that "fail" has become an adjective because it can be preceded by the quantifying adverb so, as in "I'm so fail." [Cf. I'm so happy (adj.), but *I'm so student (n.)].

As dictionaries go, you can't get much better than that towering giant of lexicography, The Oxford English Dictionary. It's always the first place serious word lovers turn when they have questions about the origins or use of a word. Yet really serious logophiles know its limitations. There are certain instances where you need to supplement the OED with a specialist work.

Yesterday we took my son Aran, who's now three and a half, to Legoland, where he got to ride his first rollercoaster, since he's now just tall enough for the smaller ones. As we spun around the track, he leaned against me and shrieked with a mixture of trepidation and glee.

Afterwards, he proudly told me, "I scrome (/skro:m/) on the roller coaster," a form that made me sit up and take note, as it's an innovative irregular past form of "scream" that I'm pretty sure he came up with himself, although I can't completely rule out the possibility that he heard it at his preschool.

This article from the BBC magazine talks about the decline of the hyphen. The new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has apparently removed the hyphens from some 16,000 words, reflecting a decline in how people use them.

The title is not an instance of editorial error, nor the start of a question (e.g., "Won't fixing one thing break something else?" but evidence of a new compound verb with a very unusual structure.

I first saw it on a developer's issue board.

"Clearing my issue queue. I don't think these fixes are going to go in anyway - won't fixing."

In contrast to the somewhat pejorative use of "Democrat Party" by some U.S. Republicans to refer to the Democratic Party, "Democrat Party" appears to be the official English translation of Phak Prachathipat (????????????????).

At some point in your schooling, you were almost certainly introduced to verb tenses. We'll develop a precise understanding of tense in a moment, but for now, think back to what you were taught. What is tense? How many different tenses can you remember learning for English? Take a moment to jot down what you can remember before continuing.

A colleague passed on a three-way e-mail exchange discussing the difference between hang and hung.

By itself, that isn't all that interesting. The usage guides all give more or less the same instructions. This explanation from The American Heritage Dictionary is typical:

I've been neglecting this blog for a while, largely the result of going on vacation. I spent two and a half weeks in Malaysia, and another two weeks recovering from jet lag and trying to catch up with other work. We went to introduce our son Aran (now 14 months old) to his great grandmother and the rest of my wife's very large clan. We all had a wonderful time, even Aran, who, after getting over some stranger anxiety, seemed to lap up the attention from all his cousins.

Linguists often like to explore sentences that are grammatically well formed but hard for people to parse. Apart from provoking simple curiosity, they also suggest things about how the mind processes language. So, for example, there are "garden path" sentences such as "The horse raced past the barn fell." There are also sentences composed from homophones. Stephen Pinker (in The Language Instinct) provides one from Buffalo (the city), buffalo (the animal), and buffalo (to deceive or intimidate):

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Which means "Bison from Buffalo (that other) bison from Buffalo intimidate (themselves) intimidate (other) bison from Buffalo."