The New York Times has an interesting article about efforts in Shanghai to make public signs and menus more intelligible to English speakers.

A sign of the dire budget times at Florida State: The English department has cut telephones from its budget.

Yes, English professors there are actually having their office phones removed, according to this story in the Tallahassee Democrat.

Do you have a similar tale of penny-pinching at a Triangle university? Drop me a line at eric.ferreri@newsobserver.com.

Across the nation, English at four-year colleges and universities is being taught by instructors who are neither tenured or on the tenure-track, raising questions about the quality of the education students are getting as tuition continues to rise.

So says a new report
released today by the Modern Language Association. Of 135 English departments surveyed, the share of non-tenure-track faculty rose from 12.9 percent to nearly 17 percent between 1999 and last year.

Among other findings:

This is fun. Click here to see how many of the 100 most common words in English you can guess in five minutes. 

(Thanks to Chris for pointing this out.)