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The meaning of words, and the way we used them, change all the time - and that's OK with linguist John McWhorter of Columbia University. He writes about how the English language has evolved in his new book, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like Literally). This is a terrific book, by the way, with lots of entertaining examples of language shift, semantic drift, linguistic blending and contracting: perfect read for Words R Us. Highly recommended!

Anne Curzan, an English professor and linguist at the University of Michigan, examines texting from a descriptionist perspective. Curzan notes that that effective electronically-mediated communication (EMC) users have a shared system of rules and a detailed set of conventions that moves real-time conversation into written form.

Singular "they," the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening. In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over "thanks, Obama," ammosexual, "on fleek," and other contenders for this annual award given to the most significant term or word in the past year. Singular they, which The Washington Post officially adopted in its Style guide in 2015, is already a common habit in American speech. An example: "Everyone wants their cat to succeed." Earlier, the so-called proper way to say it would have been, "Everyone wants his or her cat to succeed."But what gave this word new prominence was its usefulness as a way to refer to people who don't want to be called "he" or "she." "We know about singular they already - we use it everyday without thinking about it, so this is bringing it to the fore in a more conscious way, and also playing into emerging ideas about gender identity," said linguist Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who presided over the voting this Friday afternoon.

"Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English - and indeed other languages - is that the language changes," said Joshua Plotkin, co-author of the research from the University of Pennsylvania. "The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side." Writing in the journal Nature, Plotkin and colleagues describe how they tracked different types of grammatical changes across the ages. Among them, the team looked at changes in American English across more than one hundred thousand texts from 1810 onwards, focusing on the use of "ed" in the past tense of verbs compared with irregular forms - for example, "spilled" versus "spilt". The hunt threw up 36 verbs which had at least two different forms of past tense, including quit/quitted and leaped/leapt. However for the majority, including spilled v spilt, the team said that which form was waxing or waning was not clearly down to selection - meaning it is probably down to chance over which word individuals heard and copied. "Chance can play an important role even in language evolution - as we know it does in biological evolution," said Plotkin, adding that the impact of random chance on language had not been fully appreciated before.