Category: Uncategorized
Madeline Kripke: dictionary collector
Joan Hall, editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, forwarded this link to the email list of the Dictionary Society of North America: The Gifted in Pursuit of the Valued from Americana Exchange. It’s a long, contemplative story (including an audio interview) about Madeleine Kripke, a New York City rare book dealer and antiquarian…
Funny ideas about language
Arnold Zwicky’s granddaughter Opal has some funny ideas about language: At one point on that trip to Germany, Opal awoke from napping in her mother’s arms to find Elizabeth negotiating with a desk clerk in German. Opal shrieked, demanded to be let down, and ran to the door, trying to get out of the pension.…
De-hyphenizing a dictionary
One of the more interesting aspects of the new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is that the editorial team, lead by Angus Stevenson, (not Jesse Sheidlower, as mistakenly reported by the American Spectator; Jesse is only doing publicity for the new edition) chose to remove the hyphens from many words. BBC has a fairly decent story…
Dictionaries become 3D objets d’art
Found on Boing Boing, Brian Dettmer carves up reference works so that the flat images on interior pages take on shape and form.
Foreign accent syndrome: not really a foreign accent
Dennis Baron explains that in cases of “foreign accent syndrome,” in which someone receives a head injury and then begins speaking differently, they’re not really taking on a specific, pre-existing accent of a different language or social group. Foreign accent syndrome only affects the sound of someone’s speech, not their syntax or vocabulary. What’s really…
As far from coffee as you can get and still drink something brown
Francis exposes this horror to the world: a bottled espresso-like drink that uses the slogan “Icespress yourself” on top of a Fox-TV-style waving American flag, and crosses off “French” in “French Vanilla” with a big red line and replaces it with a bright red “American” in a cheesy font. All it wants now is a…
Naming trends: out of 20 boys, there are five Joshes and four Sams
What’s in a name? “Out of the 20 boys in Year 4, nearly half are called either Josh or Sam.”
“Why does it start with A B C and not F D Q?”
Elizabeth Hand reviews David Plante’s book ABC for the Washington Post. She describes it as an eccentric contemporary folk tale about a grief-bound pack of new acquaintances compulsively in search of the origins of the alphabet. “What is an alphabet, really, but a means of expressing what is inexpressible: the sum of all human history…
Climbing frame vs. monkey bars vs. jungle gym
Lynne at Separated by a Common Language has given monkey bars, jungle gym, and climbing frame and other playground attractions the American vs. British treatment in response to an email I sent her in March. Busy lady, hanging around with television stars and all. I’m surprised it didn’t take longer. 🙂
Skunks, bears, and chipmunks: prey caught by camera trap
Chris Wemmer is a Californian, biologist, and retired Smithsonian scientist who keeps an engrossing blog, Camera Trap Codger, about the animals he photographs. His camera traps are set in the woods near water sources and other high-traffic animal zones, where the animals trigger the traps with their activity. Besides interesting photographs, Chris has a pleasant,…