"If a bomb goes off, you're going to be in the hurt locker. That's how they used it in Baghdad," Mark Boal told the New Yorker. "It means slightly different things to different people, but all the definitions point to the same idea. It's somewhere you don't want to be."

Although American sports writers have used the phrase for at least two decades - to refer to injured players, or a team languishing in the league - the Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded example dates from 1966, says Fiona McPherson, senior editor of the OED's new words group.

"It's from a Texas newspaper and it says 'If an army marches on its stomach, Old Charlie is in the hurt locker'. Old Charlie is the Viet Cong. It is similar to the phrases 'world of hurt' or 'world of pain'.

Ms Duffy, one of the main organisers of the event, admitted that "poetry makes nothing happen."

But she said it "has the power of prayer and is the place in language where we are at our most human."

She added: "The people of Haiti need our humanity right now."

1. Jacqueline Wilson (16 million)
2. Danielle Steel (14 million)
3. Catherine Cookson (14 million)
4. Josephine Cox (13 million)
5. James Patterson (11 million)
6. RL Stine (10 million)
7. Mick Inkpen (10 million)
8. Janet & Allan Ahlberg (9 million)
9. Roald Dahl (8 million)
10. Agatha Christie (8 million)

The 11 letters, written between 1951 and 1993, were sent to his friend of more than 40 years E Michael Mitchell, who at one point Salinger addresses, Holden Caulfield-style, as "Buddyroo". They show that he would start work every morning at six, or seven at the latest, refusing to be interrupted "unless absolutely necessary or convenient", according to a report in the New York Times, which revealed that the letters were to be made public at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan.

A 1966 letter points to "ten, 12 years' work [which includes] two particular scripts – books really - that I've been hoarding at and picking at for years," the New York Times reported, while in 1951, the author refers to a trip to London just before The Catcher in the Rye was published, during which he visited the home of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh for cocktails. "Naturally, some gin went up my nose. I damn near left by the window," Salinger wrote.

The filing comes a week after it was disclosed that investor Ron Burkle sent a letter to the B&N board questioning its November passage of a poison pill designed to discourage outside investors from accumulating too big a position in B&N. Burkle, who owns 18.7% of B&N's shares through his Yucaipa funds, asked the board to waive the rule to permit him to acquire up to a 37% stake in the bookseller. The poison pill is triggered if a shareholder owning more than 20% of B&N stock acquires additional shares.

The honorary role would see the successful candidate promote the city's culture, as well as literary events.

A "clear majority" voted in favour of the voluntary position on Monday night. The city will now follow in the footsteps of Cambridge and Birmingham.

Councillor David Williams, who proposed the idea, said the move would encourage new talent.

Tops on the Michigan university's list of useless phrases was "shovel-ready." The term refers to infrastructure projects that are ready to break ground and was popularly used to describe road, bridge and other construction projects fueled by stimulus funds from the Obama administration.

And speaking of stimulus, that word -- which was applied to government spending aimed at boosting the economy -- made the over-used category as well, along with an odd assortment of Obama-related constructions such as Obamacare and Obamanomics.

"We say Obamanough already," the LSSU committee said.

And all of its variations…tweetaholic, retweet, twitterhea, twitterature, twittersphere…

"People tweet and retweet and I just heard the word 'tweet' so many times it lost all meaning." – Ricardo, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.

Mikhail Swift of Hillman, Mich. says the tweeting is "pointless…yet has somehow managed to take the nation by storm. I'm tired of hearing about celebrity X's new tweet, and how great of a tweeter he or she is."

"I don't know a single non-celebrity who actually uses it," says Alex Thompson of Sault St. Marie, Mich.

Jay Brazier of Williamston, Mich. says she supposes that tweeters might be "twits."

"I think my life has been more affected by 'Google' than '9/11,' " says a college student.

"People are currently tweeting that 'tweet' is being nominated for word of the year," observes someone else.

After much discussion, the final vote. A year and a decade, both recently laid to rest, receive the briefest kind of epitaph. The two words meant to evoke the feeling of this moment years from now: "tweet" for 2009 and "Google" for the Aughts.

• tweet: (noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message)
• "google: (a generic form of "Google," meaning "to search the Internet")

The poem begins: "On the first day of Christmas, a buzzard on a branch. In Afghanistan, no partridge, pear tree; but my true love sent to me a card from home.

"I sat alone, crouched in yellow dust, and traced the grins of my kids with my thumb. Somewhere down the line, for another father, husband, brother, son, a bullet with his name on."

The other 11 verses see the poet give her interpretation of the traditional Christmas song while commentating on the state of society and politics.

The policy has both long-term and short-term targets. By 2012, Hachette plans to raise the use of recycled fiber from 3% to 30%, with a majority of the fiber to be postconsumer. Hachette also intends to have FSC-certified papers account for at least 20% of paper use by 2012. 2020 is the target date for Hachette to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20% and to reduce its carbon footprint 2% per year off of a 2008 baseline.

*****

Other aspects of the environmental policy include avoiding the use of paper sourced from any ancient or endangered forests, using paper that has been bleached without the use of chlorine, and using inks with low contents of volatile organic compounds. Hachette also hopes to reduce the number of books in landfills by improving projections of consumer demand, increasing the use of on-demand printing, and working with retailers to lower returns.

unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, "I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight."

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most "un-" prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar "un-" verbs (uncap, unpack), but "unfriend" is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of "friend" that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal."

Sadly, the text-to-speech abilities of the Kindle were crippled shortly after launch following complaints from the Authors' Guild of America that the text-to-speech functionality in the Kindle 2 -- which promised to bring the benefits of electronic books to blind and partially sighted people -- were infringing authors' rights to be paid a separate royalty for all verbal performances of their works.

This disagreement -- which saw Amazon head off a lawsuit by making the text-to-speech capability controllable by e-book publishers via a flag which disables the functionality -- is directly responsible for the DX's main failings, at least according to the director of libraries at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Ken Frazier: "the big disappointment [in the trials] was learning that the Kindle DX is not accessible to the blind. Advancements in text-to-speech technology have created a market opportunity for an e-book reading device that is fully accessible for everyone, [but] this version of the Kindle e-book reader missed the mark."

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, is even more scathing in his disdain for the device: in a statement regarding the use of the Kindle DX in education as a replacement for traditional textbooks, Dr. Maurer states that "it is our position that no university should consider this device [the Kindle DX] to be a viable e-book solution for its students."

An elite boarding school in Ashburnham, Mass., just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on renovating its library. But Cushing Academy wasn't just redoing its walls and carpets. The school is getting rid of the actual, physical books in favor of going digital.

And the move — thought to be the first of its kind in the country — is worrying some librarians and book lovers.

Carlisle says the library is trading its 20,000-volume collection for a database of millions of digital books. All students can read any of the books, either through the 68 Amazon Kindles cycling around campus or on the laptop that each of the school's 450 students is provided.

The two works are The Imitation Game, a biography of mathematician Alan Turing by comics writer and science biographer Jim Ottaviani and artist Leland Purvis; and Red Light Properties by Dan Goldman, described as a "paranormal real estate tale" by literary agent Bob Mecoy of Creative Book Services, who represents all the creators and negotiated the deal on their behalf.

The two works were acquired by Tor.com producer Pablo Defendini, who described the acquistions as part of Tor.com's mandate to experiment with nontraditional publishing strategies. But he also emphasized that the acquisition also highlights how important and popular comics have become on the site, which he also said will be redesigned and relaunched in 2010..