All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

I chose my words carefully for today's notebook, as I'm discussing the dean of the dictionary, the lord of lexicon.

As a speechwriter in the Nixon administration, William Safire penned some of the most memorable lines in politics like "nattering nabobs of negativism" and "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."

While his alchemy of alliterative acumen was alluring, he's best known for the words and phrases he deconstructed as the author of the weekly New York Times column "On Language."

Though he never graduated from college, Safire became the everyman of etymology - teaching us not only what the popular words of the day meant, but why they mattered.

In an age of abbreviated text messages and emails sent in lower case...as though they were written by e.e. cummings - that little grain of both good grammar and good humor was a refreshing Sunday treat.

For all those precisely punctuated, succinctly structured sentences - we'll miss him, period.

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

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Hi, everyone.

Should English be America's official language?

So far, 28 states have passed laws making it so.

But there's a big problem. There just aren't enough teachers to help immigrants learn the language.

More immigrants are settling in suburbs -- and sometimes have to wait MONTHS for an opening in an English class. A survey last year found the wait stretched to two YEARS in New Mexico and Massachusetts.

If communities are going to make English the official language, they need to help new residents learn it. Right now, government funding for classes is sporadic, and varies from state to state. Lamar Alexander, the former education secretary, put it simply: "If we make it easier, people will learn English," he said, adding that the government needs to make it a priority and provide adequate funding.

That makes sense -- in any language.

That's a page from my notebook.

Do you find yourself hearing #$&%$! and *&%$#! a lot more these days?

Katie has some G-rated thoughts on that in today's Notebook.

Just click the monitor to watch.

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