Clearly I am in a judgmental phase. When I saw this year's list of words that Merriam-Webster Unabridged has added to its pages, I groaned with dismay a few times. Normally I love learning new words, and I hadn't known a lot of these words, but some seemed pointless.

Michael Everson, a linguist living in Ireland, is responsible for helping the literary history of the human species survive in the digital age. He is also responsible for helping you give somebody the finger through your iPhone.

If you want your kids to learn to talk in the best possible way, a new study suggests you should ditch the baby talk and speak to them in normal sentences. The findings suggest that videos that claim to teach toddlers, or flash cards for tots, may not be the best idea.

I've always been extremely sarcastic. I'm the person who says "Oh, great!" to spilled coffee, or responds with "Wow, you're smart!" when one of my friends says something obvious. But in a world where we rely on text messages and emails to communicate, it can be hard to express sarcasm or irony in written form.