FINALLY back in the full swing of the New Year. With just a little time free today, I offer only a few quick pointers:

- My review of Michael Erard’s “Babel No More”, about people who learn vast numbers of languages, appeared in last week’s print edition.

- the December 13th post “What is the Chinese language?“, which barely made any points but which invited readers to debate two contrasting views of Chinese, is, amazingly, still the most commented recent article on Economist.com, with over 2,117 comments and counting. This is easily the most commented-upon Johnson post in our 1.5 years of blogging. I can’t promise I’ll read them all, but I’ll read as many as I can and return to the subject soon.

- Mark your calendar for the January 6th announcement of the Word of the Year. The American Dialect Society, which will present it, apparently failed PR class, as the vote is on a Friday evening in Portland, Oregon, when the rest of the world will be off the grid for the weekend. Or perhaps they aimed cleverly to have it reported extensively in the Sunday papers, who knows? In any case, we’ll stay tuned, to see if the easy favorite “occupy” will take the WOTY or if something else can sneak past it.

From Johnson’s Notebook