Tag: language
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On good and gobbledygook writing
Rivaling Winston Churchill’s missive on brevity, this 1944 memo by Maury Maverick is the first known use of the word gobbledygook and dishes out some hard truths about good writing: Be short and use Plain English. Memoranda should be as short as clearness will allow. The Naval officer who wired “Sighted Sub — Sank Same” told the…
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Word compendiums for the win
It’s hard to even imagine now, but aimlessly browsing bookstores was something I did semi-regularly back in my single and then pre-kid days. One kind of book I’d always keep an eye out for was (for lack of a better name) word compendiums, an author’s curated collection of rare, idiosyncratic, or just plain cool words.…
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Before sisu, there was sisucunda
You might have heard of sisu, the Finnish concept of grittiness and perseverance in the midst of struggle. I was pleased to learn of its own etymological history: The history of the concept may help us understand its continuing resonance in Finnish culture today. The word originates from ‘sisus’, which literally means ‘guts’ or ‘the…
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New words for obscure sorrows
I love learning new words. (And writing them down.) All the better when they are invented words. John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a collection of words Koenig has created—inspired by real etymology—for specific emotions that don’t have precise English words to describe them. Tell me you haven’t felt every one of these: Sonder:…
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Päntsdrunk, baby box, Moomin, and Finland’s other official emojis
God bless Finland, my ancestral homeland. First, there’s the new book Pantsdrunk (Kalsarikanni): The Finnish Path to Relaxation (Drinking at Home Alone in your Underwear) by Miska Rantanen. From the publisher: Danes have hygge. Swedes have lagom. But the Finnish secret to contentment is faster and easier—”kalsarikänni” or pantsdrunk—drinking at home, alone, in your underwear.…
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Abolish the apostrophe!
I came out against irregular superlatives. I lobbied for the interrobang. Now throw this on my personal 2018 platform: Abolish the apostrophe. James Harbeck laid out the case against them a few years ago in an article that, to make his point, lacks apostrophes: Why are so many people so confused by apostrophes? Because they…
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Lane Greene’s language litany
Lane Greene, from his forthcoming book Talk on the Wild Side: Language is not so much logical as it is useful. It is not composed; it is improvised. It is not well behaved; it is resourceful. It is not delicate; it is hardy. It is not always efficient, but its redundancy makes it robust. It…
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OED can you see?
A used books and records store in my town just moved even closer to my place. Today I stopped by and saw a two-volume Oxford English Dictionary Compact Edition. It comes in a case and with its own magnifying glass, because they weren’t kidding when they called it compact: I exercised enough self-control to pass…
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Make the interrobang banal‽
99% Invisible (a personal favorite podcast) just did a typically great short history of the interrobang and its fight for survival: Today, the interrobang is just barely hanging in there. It has its own character in Unicode, the common directory of symbols which all computer fonts must reference. But Keith Houston points out that it…
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What a Chad
I get the Word of the Day from Merriam-Webster, the OED, and Urban Dictionary in my RSS feed every day, which usually make for a lively bunch. Well, today, May 8, 2018, Urban Dictionary’s Word of the Day is What A Chad: A phrase describing a stereotypical young urban white male, typically single and in his…
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Dictionary on display
This morning I looked at my bookshelves and noticed my three volumes of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. I haven’t cracked them open since I got them from Half Price Books a few months ago. I was so excited to get them so I’d have an accessible and thorough way to tap into the dictionary’s…
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Inherit the Words
I was helping my parents clear out their bookshelves in advance of their living room being painted and in the process stumbled upon some interesting artifacts. Among the books, family photo albums, and LPs that had stuck around unplayed for decades, I spotted a small University of Wisconsin notebook. I opened it to find in…
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No More ‘More’: Against Irregular Superlatives
Who’s ready for a grammatical crusade of pedantic proportions?! Get in on this: It’s time to standardize English comparative and superlative adjectives. Those are used when you are comparing one or more things. For example, a banana can be big, bigger, or biggest. The -er and -est progression is common and used for most adjectives.…
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Love I’m Oh Know Baby Got Yeah
In my wiki-browsing I was led to the page on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and saw this fun tidbit: Love is the most frequent word used in the songs’ lyrics, with 1057 occurrences, followed by I’m (1000 uses), oh (847 uses), know (779 uses), baby (746 uses), got (702 uses), and…
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Word by Word
“The process of creating a dictionary is magical, frustrating, brain wrenching, mundane, transcendent. It is ultimately a show of love for a language that has been called unlovely and unlovable.” Unlovable? Bah! English may be a strange, amorphous beast, but its quirkiness is its charm. In Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Kory…
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DDC 450-499: A grossly unfair linguistic ellipses
A Teach Me How To Dewey production This Is How We Dewey: 450 Italian, Romanian & related languages 460 Spanish, Portuguese, Galician 470 Latin & Italic languages 480 Classical & modern Greek languages 490 Other languages Here’s the deal: I started trying to find books in each of the above 10-spots but was having trouble…
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Every Book Its Clean Reader
I was ready to scoff at the makers of Clean Reader, an app that blocks swear words from being seen on ebooks. Jared and Kirsten Maughan offered rationale for their app in the FAQ: The number one argument against Clean Reader is essentially that an author is an artist and they put specific words in…
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Irregardless Is A Word, But A Bad One
Ta-Nehisi Coates went all TNC the other night on Twitter (which is just plain fun to watch) to address the evergreen “___ isn’t a word” debate, a favorite parlor game of pedantic English majors everywhere. Addressing whether irregardless should be sanctioned as a real word when regardless was already acceptable, he ventured: “Worst argument is…
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DDC 440-449: Foux Du Fa French
A Teach Me How To Dewey production This Is How We Dewey: 440 Romance languages; French 441 French writing system & phonology 442 French etymology 443 French dictionaries 444 Not assigned or no longer used 445 French grammar 446 Not assigned or no longer used 447 French language variations 448 Standard French usage 449 Provençal & Catalan…