From the lighter side

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Joel Achenbach writes that he felt a bit guilty recently when interviewing a scientist on deadline: "Here I am calling up and saying: 'Give me the fruit of your mental labors.' Asking for the ripest fruit, as it were. Asking not just for information but for wisdom. Give it to me! For free. And they did, because they always do, because we have a system of sorts." Does that make him an aggregator, a journalist, or both? More from Joshua Benton.

You're mispronouncing a lot of English words and that's OK, David Shariatmadari writes in the Guardian. Words like "apron" and "umpire" lost their initial consonants in a process linguists call "rebracketing." "Metathesis" turned brids into birds and a waps into a wasp. "Today's mistake could be tomorrow's vigorously defended norm," Shariatmadari writes. "There are lots of wonderful examples of alternative pronunciations or missteps that have become standard usage."

The writing and editing are all over and it's time for the hardest part — celebrating your book's publication. But Bill Ferris is here to help with an all-too-true guide to planning a book launch party: "Like any good party, you can't have just ANYBODY showing up. Limit invitations to whoever happens to be on your Facebook friends list. Don't bother with real-life invitations – you've burned out all your real-life friendships by asking them to beta-read your novel."

It's not "Join the conversation" or "Like us on Facebook" or even "Forgot your password?" but another common expression that sums up the Internet experience, Matthew J.X. Malady writes in the New Republic: "If 'Your an idiot!' doesn't ring a bell, then you probably don't use the Internet all that much. (Also: You should count yourself as lucky and be sure to proceed through the remainder of your life exactly as you have up to this point.) You, my friend, are no idiot."

Why do writers procrastinate? Writing in the Atlantic, Megan McArdle theorizes that it's because they were very smart when they were children: "If you've spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good."

Nothing stirs the writer's senses quite like a good, if pointless, fight over a technical detail of prose. Here are two examples. First, Kristin Piombino discusses an infographic on the pros and cons of the Oxford comma, noting among other things that even Oxford seems to disagree about whether or not to use it. Second, from the archives, a rant in Salon on people who persist in the typewriter-age habit of putting two spaces after a period.

Maria Popova unearths a set of nine rules for healthy skepticism, set down by the man she calls "our era's greatest patron saint of reason and common sense." Popova writes that Sagan's politely named "baloney detection kit" comes from science but "contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation."

From Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview.org here's the worst of the worst of the year's health news releases. Highlights include a pitch for Dr. Paul's Piggy Paste, a cure-all for unsightly toenails; a dentist's press release on an epidemic of "Bulldog Face" and its health implications; various items touting "chlorogenic acids" or "ashwagandha," and of course, the story of how Oreo cookies may be as addictive as cocaine. More from Paul Raeburn.

Just when you think you've gotten the hang of this grammar thing, somebody goes and changes it. From the Atlantic's Megan Garber comes news that linguists are accepting a new role for "because." Garber says you can blame the social media culture's affinity for efficiency and irony: "I'm late because YouTube. You're reading this because procrastination. As the language writer Stan Carey delightfully sums it up: '"Because" has become a preposition, because grammar.'"