an xkcd comic

Here’s a roundup of my favorite language-related stories, brought to you by the pipes of the Internet.

Ben Zimmer meditates on The Beatles’ use of pronouns in The New York Times.

Really? Bubble Wrap is a trademark? Here are twenty-four other words you might not know are trademarked, all in one nifty post from Mental Floss.

Kinda freaky for the younglings, but . . . David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in children’s book form.

Fun quiz! Guess the books by their covers at Sporcle.

How Shakespearean are you? This neat page lets you cut and paste a passage of modern-day English and compares it with all words Shakespeare used in his plays to give you a percentage of your passage’s words that you could find in, say, Othello. From the OxfordWords blog. And they say the English language is dumbed down.