Forget the Gunplay, These Cowboys Get Their Kicks From Wordplay   Our New Year's tradition: the music group Riders in the Sky, joined by Johnny Western, tell the story of a fellow with a strange habit of speaking only in palindromes

Five New Year's Resolutions for Learners to Improve Their English   ''My first resolution that I would recommend people make is to spend a certain amount of time listening to English ... whatever suits a person's work schedule''

Words of 2007, From 'Surge' to 'Left of Boom' to 'E-Mail Bankruptcy'   ''E-mail bankruptcy is when you have so much e-mail ... you say to yourself 'I'm not even going to bother with these,''' says lexicographer Grant Barrett

A Fast Way to Make Yourself a Better Understood Speaker? Slow Down   ''Whenever you're speaking to a group you have to slow down anyway, even if you're a native speaker,'' says English teacher Nina Weinstein

Take a Deep Breath: Tips on Preparing for an Oral Presentation   ''A lot of times people are nervous because they're focused on themselves. And I tell them that's not the focus,'' says English teacher Nina Weinstein

Talking Dictionaries on Web Offer an Earful of Pronunciations   We answer some listener questions -- for instance, what do you call people who talk in their sleep?

Meet a Labor Lawyer Whose Labor of Love Is Writing About Slang   A conversation with Tom Dalzell, the senior editor of the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English

Compounding Makes All the Difference Between a Black Bird and a Blackbird   ''Compounding is when we take two words in English and we put them together to make a brand-new word,'' says teacher and author Lida Baker

Group Led by Seattle Writer Promotes Good (Not Perfect) Grammar   ''I'm pretty regularly told 'You're stupid,' and I would take it a lot more seriously if they used the apostrophe instead of just Y-O-U-R,'' says Martha Brockenbrough

What Aphorists Have to Say About the Cultures That Produced Them   More with James Geary, author of ''Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists,'' who says Ben Franklin was America's first great spinner of philosophical sayings

Aphorisms: How a Few Words Can Speak Volumes About Life and Living   James Geary, author of the newly published ''Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists,'' discusses this literary art form. First of two parts.

How to Use Small Talk to Build a Bridge to the Heart of a Conversation   ''I tell my students this is like playing tennis. When someone says 'Beautiful day today, isn't it?' they've hit the ball to you,'' says English teacher Nina Weinstein

Writer Says Bias Against Sayers of 'Um' May Have Been Stoked by, Uh, Radio   "People who say 'uh' or 'um' are not necessarily uneducated or unprepared or unintelligent," says Michael Erard, author of a new book called "Um..."

No Need to Freak Out About Some Idioms, Even in More Formal Contexts   A. C. Kemp, who teaches English at M.I.T. and runs slangcity.com, discusses frequently used terms from TV shows and movies. Second of two parts

Dude! Check Out Some of the Most Common Slang in Popular Speech   A. C. Kemp, an English teacher at M.I.T. and keeper of slangcity.com, did a computer analysis of TV and movie scripts for us and discusses her findings

Why Some Speeches Just Float Away on the Air and Others Stick in Our Minds   From a C-SPAN television interview, political adviser Frank Luntz discusses his book "Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear"

Wise Writing Instead of '-Wise' Writing: Looking for Beauty in Words   Advice from longtime writing coach Paula LaRocque, author of the new book "On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work -- and Don't"

New Books Cast Cinderella, Other Fairy Tale Stars as Language Teachers   Our friend David Burke, known as Slangman, talks about his latest instructional materials, which are aimed at American children

Program Moves Online to Train Teachers in Global English   ''It's unique because in addition to teaching the skills of teaching English, it engages in the political, economic and cultural theory of what it means to learn English''

In America, Struggling for the 'Correct' Terminology to Discuss Disabilities   ''What's happened is that words that fifty years ago were perfectly acceptable words have become unacceptable words,'' says linguist Mark Aronoff

Showing Students That Good Writing Matters, and Not Just in English Class   Nancy Tuten of Columbia College in South Carolina talks about the value of working with professors in different disciplines to promote writing across the curriculum

'Hypercorrection Is Not Simply Being Fussy or a Nitpicker or a Pedant'   "It means working so hard to avoid one potential problem that you end up falling into another one," says Jack Lynch, an English professor at Rutgers University

Sprinkling a Few Prepositions Into Speech to Sound More Natural   English teacher Nina Weinstein follows up on her advice about handshakes to discuss other areas of business communication, including the importance of eye contact

The Long and Short of Cornering the Market in Global Finance Lingo   ''Even if you speak French, Spanish, German or Mandarin ... finance is only English. It’s actually very mundane English,'' says professor Salih Neftci

How a Handshake Can Say a Lot About You in Business Communication   ''Also, people hug here a lot more than they may in other cultures. My students can be very uncomfortable with that,'' says English teacher Nina Weinstein

Inside the Mind of a Stand-Up Comic Vying for Title of 'Funniest Fed'   ''One of my main goals is I try to make sure everything I say takes about a second to get,'' says Shahryar Rizvi, a computer specialist at the US Census Bureau

Grasping Roots as a Way to Understand Words and Build Vocabulary   "If we learn certain Latin and Greek root words, we have kind of a window into the English language," says teacher and author Nina Weinstein

What Does Ecology Mean to You? No, Really, How Do You Define It?   More of our interview with Rob Jackson, director of Duke University's Global Change Center, about some terms you're likely to hear in the climate change debate

Saving the World, or at Least Understanding What Ecologists Mean   Professor Rob Jackson, director of the Global Change Center at Duke University, explains terms like carbon footprint and cap-and-trade, in the first of two parts

When Netspeak Enters Formal Writing, Teachers Are Anything but LOL   Jodi Schenck, an English teacher in Israel, gives her high schoolers a list of phrases from the Internet and says: "All of these things? No, you can't use them."

In Moldova, as Demand for English Grows, Teachers Try Best They Can   Viktoriya Galiy, director of a language school in Chisinau, says native speaking teachers and teacher training programs are both in short supply

Think 'Uh Huh' and 'Unh Unh' Sound Alike? Then You'll Be Saying 'Oops!'   English teacher Nina Weinstein takes the confusion out of some common conversational strategies in American English that can help speakers buy time

Teaching English in Central Asia: The View From Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan   Shukry Marash-Ogly is a linguistics professor in Kyrgyzstan. We also hear from Ibrahim Rustamov, a secondary school teacher in Tajikistan.

When Conflicts Follow Young Immigrants to School in a New Land   Yvette Drew, who teaches English as a second language to newcomers in the Atlanta area, discusses why her students are so interested in politics

English Teaching in the Arab World: Insights From Iraq and Libya   Interviews from the TESOL 2007 Convention in Seattle: An Iraqi professor who teaches English teachers, and a Libyan teacher (pictured) in the US to teach Arabic

How to Make a Fashion Statement in a World of 'Voguespeak,' Muffin Tops   Want to be a fashionista, or at least sound like one? Take to the catwalk and learn some of the terms used in the fashion industry

He Shoots, He Scores; She Shoots, She Scores. 'Slam Dunk' Terms Resound   For the start of March Madness, the flurry of college basketball games for the national championship, a look at some of the lingo that has bounced off the court

The More Quotations Change, It Seems, the More They Remain the Same   "I think the quotations of a country express the preoccupations of that country," says Fred Shapiro, editor of the new Yale Book of Quotations

Getting in Tune With Spoken English Means Thinking in Thought Groups   "One of the easiest ways to learn about thought groups is to listen to popular music," says English teacher Lida Baker, who gives advice on improving pronunciation

Smoothing Out English With Help From Sentence Pronunciation Rules   "German has a choppy rhythm, Vietnamese has a choppy rhythm. But English doesn't; English wants to be a smooth language,'' says teacher Nina Weinstein

I Luv U, Do U Luv Me? Relating in the Techno Age; the Mystery of XOX   "Make sure you're matching your personality with the way that you act when you're online," says Kristina Grish, author of the new book "The Joy of Text"

Centuries Later, the Bard of Avon Still Makes His Mark on American English   Yet Shakespeare's language "was pretty much commonplace English" in his time, says Georgianna Ziegler of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington

Pluto Is Reborn as a Verb, While Surge Becomes a 'Hot-Button Word'   English professor Wayne Glowka discusses the American Dialect Society's 2006 Word of the Year, and the dispute over what to call the plan for more troops in Iraq

How Learning a Second Language Inhibits the First, at Least Temporarily   Losing your native language by acquiring a new one? "I would argue that this is actually an adaptive good thing," says Ben Levy at the University of Oregon

'House' or 'Home'? 'Friendlier' or 'More Friendly'? The Web Offers Answers   "What students need to look for when they're using online dictionaries, or any dictionaries, is the usage notes," says English teacher Lida Baker

Wanna, Gonna, Hafta: Getting Relaxed With Reduced Forms in Speech   "I don't advise students unnaturally adapting these forms," says Nina Weinstein, author of the book "Whaddaya Say?" -- find out what she does advise