Linguistic Mailing Lists

At the Slashdot Meetup on Thursday, Jon mentioned that he had an interest in linguistics. I offered that I could e-mail him about some of the linguistic mailing lists that I’m on. In case other people may be interested, I thought I’d to post them here.

• Buzzwhack features a buzzword-a-day mailing list. Recent examples include “managerial courage” and “yogurt cities”.
• Word Spy has a mailing list for coined-words of the day. Recent entries include “corporate anorexia” and “dirty-white-collar”.
• AWAD is one of those A Word A Day mailing list. But this isn’t just any mailing list. AWAD is received by more than 525,000 people in 206 countries daily. It was one of the first word-a-day mailing lists, and still one of the best.
• The American Dialect Society is probably most famous for their Words of The Year awards. For example, the 2001 winner for “Most Euphemistic” word was “daisy cutter - Bomb used by US Air Force”. But, they have a mailing list as well. Unlike the others listed here, this one isn’t an annoucement-only list, but a regular discussion list. They talk about dialects in America, and language in general. Topics range from discussion of The Onion’s satirical piece on two Big Beef Burritos Supreme to the subtleties of the hypothetical subjunctive. It may sound esoteric, but you might just like it; you can always unsubscribe later.
• This last one, World Wide Words is an announce-only mailing list sent out once a week. Its tagline is “Investigating International English from a British Viewpoint”. Quite often the newletter includes a question-and-answer section where they answer a reader’s question, usually something along the lines of “My grandmother uses obscure saying X all the time. How did that phrase originate?” And, granted, many of the sayings may be chiefly British, but I enjoy many of them nonetheless — part of the fun, to me, is trying to imagine saying a phrase such as “cream crackered” with a straight face ;).

As always, I welcome your feedback. If my descriptions interested you enough to subscribe to any of these newsletters, leave a comment :).