LANGUAGE

Niche Blogs: The English Language

There are many, many blogs dedicated to the use of the English language. Some are fairly comprehensive; others are tightly focused on one aspect of language usage that should be corrected, protected, or mocked. Here is a sampling of those blogs for your e

Where is Old Jersey? (and 6 other "New" location origins)

Out with the old, in with the new (literally). Jersey isn't part of the U.K., nor is it a full-member state of the EU, but is a separate possession of The Crown in Right of the United Kingdom.

George Orwell: Politics and the English Language

In 1946, George Orwell published an essay in the British literary magazine Horizon, arguing against poor usage of English by modern writers. In the essay, Orwell cited five examples of "the English language as it is now habitually written." The examples

How To Get a Word into the Oxford English Dictionary

The short process is: meet someone who works at the OED evaluating new words for inclusion. The slightly longer process involves plying him or her with drink. The most complete answer is contained in Lyza Danger Gardner's blog entry How I Got a Word in

Why reCAPTCHA is Good for Humanity

Last week we talked about KittenAuth, a novel CAPTCHA system used to differentiate between humans and spambots -- by using pictures of kittens. Today let's take a look at reCAPTCHA, the system in use by this very blog. What does it do, and why is it goo

Naming Conventions

Yesterday I pointed to a list of IKEA Naming Conventions, revealing the logic behind how they've named their products. In my life, the main families of items I see named are computers (generally, servers). At my office, we name the servers after sushi -

IKEA Naming Conventions

IKEA Naming

Accent archive fun

One of the best things about calling LA home is the opportunity to live unabashedly through your actor friends. If I think I've had a bad day, say, maybe received a couple rejection slips in the mail or some line producer isn't calling me back, my actor f

It's not runes, it's just: Fun with Dictionaries

Growing up, a trip to the library was usually doomed to be frustrating because I could never decide which books to check out; hence (and with Sunday School visions of King Solomon's, er, radical problem-solving techniques still in my head), I removed any

Whether you can talk or not: palms up means supplication

Today's John Tierney-authored Findings column discusses the evolution and significance of the upturned palm and its variants--the shrug, the downturned palm, etc: That simple gesture, the upturned palm, is one of the oldest and most widely understood sign

Sticks and Stones May Break Bones...

The only time a nickname has ever offended me was in kindergarten, when my teacher started calling me Jason the Mason. See, Jason the Mason was a brick-working pig from a book we were reading. I didn't take kindly to being called a pig, so I broke down in

Speak no evil

As you've probably been following over the last years, there have been a lot of complaints in Singapore over the youngins' excessive use of Singlish. Likewise, Manglish is now under attack in Malaysia, only the Malaysian government is a lot more serious

Weekend Word Wrap: mondegreens

Today's edition of the Weekend Word Wrap is on mondegreens. Long before I ever knew what a mondegreen was, I used to think the lyrics of David Bowie's "Suffragette City" went like this: Hey man, oh leave me alone, you know Hey man, oh Henry, get off the

The Punctuating Panda

We know it's Friday, and you're gearing up for a fun weekend. What better way to get you ready than having some fun, right here, right now: some mental_fun. Lynne Truss has a great punctuation game over at her Eats, Shoots & Leaves site, which rates ever