The alt.usage.english FAQ   

• Related newsgroups

  (Welcome)
  
  There is a mailing list for copy-editors. To subscribe, send e-mail with the text "SUBSCRIBE COPYEDITING-L Your Name" to listproc@cornell.edu .
  
  sci.lang is where most of the professional linguists hang out. Discussions tend to be about linguistic methodology (rather than about *particular* words and phrases), and prescription is severely frowned upon there. Newbies post many things there that would better be posted here.
  
  alt.flame.spelling (which fewer sites carry than carry alt.usage.english) is the place to criticize other people's spelling. We try to avoid doing that here (although some of us do get provoked if you spell language terms wrong. It's "consensus", not "concensus"; "diphthong", not "dipthong"; "grammar", not "grammer"; "guttural", not "gutteral"; and "pronunciation", not "pronounciation").
  
  alt.usage.english.neologism is described as being for "meaningless words coined by psychotics". Fewer sites carry it, and it gets little traffic; the people who do post to it are generally not negative about neologisms.
  
  rec.puzzles is a better place than here to ask questions like "What English words end in '-gry' or '-endous'?", "What words contain 'vv'?", "What words have 'e' pronounced as /I/?", "What Pig Latin words are also words?", or "How do you punctuate 'John where Bill had had had had had had had had had had had the approval of the teacher' or 'That that is is that that is not is not that that is not is not that that is is that it it is' to get comprehensible text?" But, before you post such a question there, make sure it's not answered in the rec.puzzles archive, available at http://xraysgi.ims.uconn.edu:8080/ The "-gry" answer is now also to be found below in this FAQ.
  
  Wordplay for its own sake (anagrams, palindromes, etc.) belongs in alt.anagrams. There are also long lists of such things in the rec.puzzles archive. "The Word Gamer's Paradise" at http://fun2play.com/ may also be of interest.
  
  misc.education.language.english is a newsgroup devoted to the teaching of English (especially as a second language). comp.edu.languages.natural is devoted to software for assisting language instruction.
  
  misc.writing is devoted to writing, and especially to the concerns of people trying to establish themselves as professional writers.
  
  alt.quotations is the place to ask about origins of quotations (although there is no firm dividing line between those and phrase origins, which belong here). You can access the 1901 edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations at: http://www.bartleby.com/99/index.html
  
  Language features peculiar to the U.K. get discussed in soc.culture.british as well as here. Before posting to either newsgroup on this subject, you should look at Jeremy Smith's British-American dictionary, available on the WWW at: http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionary/dict.html
  
  If you have a (language-related or other) peeve that you want to mention but don't particularly want to justify, you can try alt.peeves. ("What is your pet peeve?" is *not* a frequently asked question in alt.usage.english, although we frequently get unsolicited answers to it. If you're new to this group, chances are excellent that your particular pet peeve is something that has already been discussed to death by the regulars.)
  
  If you're interested in the peculiarities of language as used by computer users, get the Jargon File from: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Jargon-Lexicon-framed.html;
  
  (also available in paperback form as _The New Hacker's Dictionary_, ed. Eric S. Raymond, 3rd edition, MIT Press, 1996, ISBN 0-262-68092-0). Words you encounter on the Net that you can't find in general English dictionaries ("automagic", "bogon", "emoticon", "mudding", the prefix "Ob-" as in "ObAUE", "prepend") you may well find in the Jargon File. You can discuss hacker language further in the newsgroup alt.folklore.computers, or in the moderated newsgroup comp.society.folklore .
  
  Two newsgroups that don't deal with the English language but that people often need directing to are: humanities.classics for questions about Latin and ancient Greek; and comp.fonts, for questions about typography.
  
  Source: [Mark Israel, 'Welcome: Related newsgroups', The alt.usage.english FAQ file,(line 351), (29 Sept 1997)]
  
  
  
  

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