Words and language in the news this week have a birthday theme.

Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of the crossword puzzle, as NPR’s protojournalist blog reports. “Created by a British-American wordsmith, the very first Word-Cross appeared in the New York World on Dec. 21, 1913. And the crossword puzzle — as we know it — was born.”

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You’ll all be thrilled to know that Oxford Dictionaries has created the “OED birthday word generator”, which allows you to find a word that started its life around the same time you did. My contemporary is blag: what’s yours? Go get busy with words your own age. Mentalfloss has the story.

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Here are seven grammar mistakes you’re probably making, courtesy HuffPost.

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