Words R Us

"Pronunciation Book shows you how to say various words [454, to be precise] in American English."

"Drew A. Rosielle MD"

"the emoticon has rather suddenly migrated from the e-mails and texts of teenagers (and perhaps the more frothy adults) to the correspondence of business people who pride themselves on their gravitas. ... recent adoptees like Dr. Bates and Ms. Heller said that emoticons not only signal intention in a medium where it's notoriously hard to read tone, they also denote a special congenial relationship between sender and recipient. ... Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that writers and teachers of writing are among the last emoticon holdouts."

Lists and maps of different English dialects, including pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary differences.

some info about slang

"...people who speak more than one language don't exhibit symptoms of Alzheimer's disease until they have twice as much brain damage as unilingual people. It's the first physical evidence that bilingualism delays the onset of the disease. ... Despite the fact that both groups performed equivalently on all measures of cognitive performance, the scans of the bilingual patients showed twice as much atrophy in areas of the brain known to be affected by Alzheimer's."

"Bryson, B. (1990) The English Language. Penguin. Chapters 6 and 8."

"Psychopathic murderers use words that reveal selfishness, detachment, and emotional flatness, according to a new study that used computer analysis to identify speech patterns."