Language Culture

Trivia - the bit of coastal land in between Holland and Denmark is known as Frisia, and the Frisian language still survives, although those who still can speak it dwindle every year. I heard a recording of some of it once, and something about it fascinated me - to the ear, it sounded almost exactly like English, except that it used a different vocabulary. (I suppose that means phrasing and vowel sounds are the same) It was like hearing people speak English in another room where you couldn't quite make it out.

…The correct way to write the phrase is beck and call. This phrase is a part of the idiom “to be at someone’s beck and call.” Beckon call is an example of an eggcorn — a slightly misheard (yet still kind of sensical) version of a common phrase.…

…I read The Pied Piper in Latin and learned what the word "pied" means. It means clothed in many different colors.

…After just forty minutes of annoying my wife with intense practice, I finally mastered the skill that had eluded me since I was eight years old. Achievement unlocked!…

Today, IS: National. Punctuation; Day!!1!

Behave… --'accordingly'?!?

Doomestic dogs, cats, hamsters or budgerigars should be rebranded as “companion animals” while owners should be known as “human carers”… Even terms such as wildlife are dismissed as insulting to the animals concerned – who should instead be known as “free-living”, the academics including an Oxford professor suggest.

The call comes from the editors of the Journal of Animal Ethics, a new academic publication devoted to the issue.…

…Thus readeth Johnson's Economist column on how punctuation is being changed by computers and the internet.

Most people take punctuation to be something obvious and settled.

… The first English writers, when they punctuated at all, availed themselves of long-forgotten symbols like the diastole and trigon, the interpunct and the diple. Printing began the process of settling the punctuation system, but even that took four centuries. Samuel Johnson’s commas, in the mid-18th century, were not only heavy; many would be ungrammatical today, and this style persisted into the first editions of The Economist in 1843.…

If you’re one of those people who packs like a weekend warrior every time you head on a camping trip, you can blame the English language.

Those word-birthing Romans conquered half of Europe around the year zero and everywhere they went, they saw only open countryside: what they called campus.…

…Dolezal rose to prominence as a black woman but was revealed last week as white by her parents.

“I don’t see why they’re in such a rush to whitewash the work that I have done and who I am and how I have identified…”

"…Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world’s language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that’s unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons.

"Also, the tones of Chinese are extremely difficult to learn beyond childhood, and truly mastering the writing system virtually requires having been born to it. …"

why add <3 as a word? A spokesperson clarified, "While symbols do become spelt-out words relatively frequently, it is usually only with a mundane meaning as the name of the symbol… It's very unusual for it to happen in such an evocative and tangential way." [Could you repeat that again in, say, plain English?]

An all Spanish-speaking television station has joined the Tulsa market. ... "It's an advertising opportunity, a marketing opportunity and a political one...."

The Supreme Court ruled narrowly Tuesday in favor of a government policy that threatens broadcasters with fines over the use of even a single curse word on live television, yet stopped short of deciding whether the policy violates the Constitution.