Around the Word

From Malaysian publishers to American copy editors to Australian bookmakers, today the BloGG is celebrating wordsmiths of all stripes from across the globe:

• Corporate communicators may want to take a peek at slide:ology author Nancy Duarte's new book on the art of communicating, Resonate: Visual Stories that Transform Audiences. Carmine Gallo hails it as the "bible of corporate storytelling"—high praise from the guru behind The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. You can hear Gallo and other guests at yesterday's launch party comment on the book, courtesy of technology speechwriter Ian Griffin's blog.
  
•  Copy editors are the unsung heroes in many a writer's quest for precision, clarity, and freedom from typos. Now Baltimore Sun's language blogger John McIntyre invites grateful writers to nominate great copyeditors for the American Copy Editors Society's annual Robinson Prize. Have any doughty copyeditors saved you from endless public embarrassment?  What was the worst mistake that (almost) got by you?
  
• New words still flow from Twitter into the mighty stream of English, and since neologisms like "to tweet" have no usage rules, grammar sprouts up spontaneously. For instance, what's more correct: do I "tweet him" or "tweet to him"? UPenn's Language Log blogger Geoffrey Pullum plugged different syntactic possibilities into Google to see what garnered the most hits, but couldn't discover a consensus. The fact that he used Google to research language trends (which I've done to ferret out correct usage) itself flags the internet's gradual influence on the contours of our language.
  
• Books, books, books! The world's biggest bibliophile-bonanza—the Frankfurt Book Fair—is winding to a close this weekend. Business and corporate writers may want to check out this year's winner of the Fair's Abstract International Book Award, Accelerating Out of the Great Recession by David Rhodes and Daniel Stelter, two senior partners at The Boston Consulting Group. The book offers a detailed account of how companies should respond to the Great Recession. On the international front, Malaysia is angling to be declared Southeast Asia's publishing hub. Plus, a behemoth book is on display: the world's biggest atlas is a six-by-nine foot tome published in the land down under. It doesn't quite take the Guinness record, which is reserved for a Hungarian book weighing 1.2 tons. Anyone for a little light reading?