Category: Uncategorized
Mafia, Seven, and Bank: English nicknames in Thailand
In Thai Cultural Battle, Name-Calling Is Encouraged. “Korakoad Wongsinchai, an English teacher at a private primary school in Bangkok, is also not sure whether the Culture Ministry’s campaign will stem the tide of English names.…More than half of her students have English names, she said, offering this sampling: Tomcruise, Elizabeth, Army, Kiwi, Charlie and God.…
The Preposition Project: 673 meanings for 334 English prepositions
This site? The Preposition Project, where “each of 673 preposition senses for 334 prepositions (mostly phrasal prepositions) has been described by giving it a semantic role or relation name and by characterizing the syntactic and semantic properties of its complement and attachment point”? That’s exactly the kind of hard work lexicographers and computational linguists do…
How I Learned English
In New West, Jenny Shank has a thorough and compelling review of How I Learned English/
Access to a computer has undoubtedly eroded the wits of press release writers
From a rewritten press release (also picked up by the New York Times) is a passage spoken by a man who’s probably never studied Civil War letters, or any collection of letters written before the typewriter age: Computers are second nature for today’s college students. They grew up with technology and the Internet. However, they…
Family words in Texas
The Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram has asked its readers for “family words,” terms they believe to be coined and used only by them and their relatives. The idea was spawned, of course, by Paul Dickson’s Family Words: A Dictionary of the Secret Language of Families. It’s really a fascinating list, in a way that lists…
Jamaican Lexicography Project appeals list
I am excited to find out about the Jamaican Lexicography Project (Jamlex), which hopes to produce a Jamaican National Dictionary to succeed and improve upon the Dictionary of Jamaican English compiled by Frederic G. Cassidy and Robert B. Le Page and the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage by Richard Allsopp. The project is run by…
50-volt stoned squirrels
A lost wilderness. “Squirrels are highly intelligent, agile enough to tightrope-walk along telephone wires, and poor conductors of electricity. Somehow they have realised that by biting through to the bare wires and short-circuiting the 50 volts that run through them into their own bodies, they can heat themselves up. In this way, Roger said, each…
Sex change or gender reassignment surgery?
Joey DiGuglielmo at the Washington Blade defends his use of the term “sex change” and ruminates on how to be language-appropriate when writing about transgendered people.
UPDATED: Dreck to the asinines
UPDATE (8/24): The battle is enjoined! Robert Hartwell Fiske calls his readers “to arms”! As it turns out, speaking good English allows you to beg for pocket change. Choire Sicha at Gawker calls the Barrett-Fiske kerfluffle a cat fight. We’re frienemies, you might say. For the older set who don’t know that word frienemy, just…