News for word nerds

What a day for word-lovers! My local newspaper greeted my early-morning eyeballs with this bold headline: "Educators learn strategies to help children cope with trama."  I suppose "trama" could be a newly minted portmanteau word combining "trauma" and "drama," but probably it's just another reminder of the dearth of good copy editing.

Speaking of copy editing, over at the New Yorker, Comma Queen Mary Norris reports on the doings at the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society (click here), where word nerds cheer news about the A.P. Stylebook's changes in hyphen use. (I'd be happy if I could get my students to recognize the existence of hyphens, but never mind.) And earlier this week NPR aired a lovely review of Norris's new book (here), Greek to Me, which ought to be arriving in my mailbox this week.

From trama queen to comma queen: that's enough word-nerd news for one morning.