Question? Answered.
The growing world of online language advice
In the bad old days — back before the Internet, when woolly mammoths roamed the earth, and nobody offered free shipping on anything — if you had a question about language, you were limited to a fairly small set of resources. You could use the dictionary. You could use a thesaurus. There were usage books, grammars, and (best of all, but probably the least used) the local reference librarian. But otherwise you were out of luck: Sure, there might be an expert with the answer somewhere, but how could you reach him or her?
Lately, though, it seems that you can’t even open a browser window without stumbling on a new site offering to help connect people with answers to their questions. Though most of these are general-interest sites, language queries are a popular topic--and indeed, some sites (like the venerable Ask.com and Answers.com) embed full dictionaries and other reference works into their sites.
If you’ve dipped your toe into the world of Q&A sites before, you may have gone away disappointed, either by a lack of substance or the lack of any answer at all. The problem of unformed questions answered by uninformed people still plagues many sites. (Try searching
But where language is concerned, there is a pretty solid Internet tradition of serious conversation and advice. The venerable Usenet group alt.usage.english has long had a FAQ (frequently asked questions) list that is notable for its comprehensiveness and quality; the forums at WordReference.com and WordOrigins.com are relatively active; publishers have put up their own sites where reader questions are answered by editors. Among this last group is AskOxford.com--now part of OxfordDictionaries.com; Word.com, the online newsletter of Merriam-Webster; as well as the Q&As hilariously answered by the staff of the Chicago Manual of Style at chicagomanualofstyle.org. There are also labors of love by individuals, such as the fantastic World Wide Words site run by language expert Michael Quinion.
Which brings us to two interesting new arrivals on the Q&A landscape: Quora.com and English.StackExchange.com. To distinguish themselves from traditional Q&A sites, both try to ensure that knowledgeable people answer the questions posed. Quora requires the use of real names; StackExchange uses a voting/reputation system that lets answerers acquire brownie points over time. (English.StackExchange.com is a new topical site from the well-regarded programming Q&A site StackOverflow--and if you don’t know what a ”stack overflow” is, you are not the audience for the original StackOverflow.) As a user of both sites, I can say that answering questions (which could tend to feel like a busman’s holiday) can be surprisingly gratifying, especially when your answer is ”upvoted,” or marked as helpful.
Questions on the two sites vary wildly in specificity: Recent questions on Quora in the ”English Language” topic include: ”I keep hearing ’eliminate adverbs’ as a piece of writing advice. Why are adverbs evil?” and ”What are fresh-sounding words like breeze, sky, leaf, and others?” Recently asked on StackExchange: ”What adjective can be used to mean ’smellable’?” and ”When is it appropriate to use a hyphen?”
Quora shows its Silicon Valley bias with questions such as ”What are the VC [venture capital] industry’s most colorful colloquialisms?” and ”Does it reflect poorly on a startup if the founder has terrible spelling and grammar?”; StackExchange reveals its geek roots with questions such as ”How to understand the word cascade in CSS?”--casually assuming the reader will know the acronym for ”cascading style sheets.”
If you’re a visitor with a question, what are these sites best for? StackExchange explicitly recommends that you ask ”practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face”--and, not surprisingly, seems to attract more of the ”please-help-me-with-my-homework” questions which sometimes can be the bane of Q&A sites (e.g., ”What is the difference between these ’clause separators’?) and questions from non-native speakers of English (”I found this expression: to put on the thinking cap, What does it mean and how to use?”). Quora states that ”Good questions always ask ’why?’ and request narrative answers”; and possibly because it’s linked to real names, Quora seems to have a bit more posturing. (”Should we make using the word ’incentivize’ illegal?”)
As a lexicographer, I find these sites fascinating as a window into the deep (and shallow!) questions people have about language, questions dictionaries don’t or can’t answer. ”Is there a word for...” questions abound on both sites; conversations over the acceptability of constructions and phrases get hot and heavy. People really do care about language, enough to spend their time discussing it, asking and answering, out loud and in public. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the new surge in Q&A sites is that they reflect a deep human faith in the knowability of all things: If we ask just the right question in just the right place and reach just the right person with it, real understanding can be ours.
Erin McKean is a lexicographer and founder of Wordnik.com. E-mail her at erin@wordnik.com. 
