Link love: language (42)

It’s been more than a month since my last linkfest. Time for another assortment of language-related reading material. (And, at the end, audiovisual.)

Email and texting as “fingered speech”.

Homophones, homonyms and co.: a Venn diagram.

On the multiple meanings of moot and changeling.

The value of editing.

Punning is serious business.

The tension of stacked parentheses.

Grammar and usage myths debunked.

Where does kindly belong?

Scots words in the wild.

A history of Ireland in 100 insults.

On gesture, or, when thought “leaks through our hands.”

Tidbits and titbits.

Proofreading a dictionary.

My life’s sentences.

When language advice misleads.

Marvellous words from Marvel Comics.

Using pronouns to predict dating success.

Headline headghgh: a gallery of dummy text.

The contentious history of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Is “me no likie” racist?

Favourite synonyms and sets of synonyms.

Hopefully: five decades of foolishness (lots more at Copyediting.com).

Tricks used by chatbots to imitate humans.

Linguistics from an evolutionary point of view (PDF).

How blogs and Twitter are changing science writing (talk, 1 hr 11 min.).

[language links archive]

Link love: language (41)

A score, and no more, of links on words and language. As always, you’ll find some old, some new, some borrowed, some blue.

Origin of the gender symbols ♀ and ♂.

“The parchment is hairy.” Medieval marginalia.

Rude Irish place names.

Die, dice, and the strange limbo between count nouns.

“I’m afraid I’ve caught poetry.”

Perverse + proverb = perverb.

“Yoghurt retains a health halo”: translating PR jargon.

Is divissive divisive?

On the AP’s “fuddy-duddy prohibition” of spokesperson.

Euphuism.

The inaugural World Palindrome Championship.

Handmade Type: an experiment in gesture.

On scolding someone in an Irish accent.

The etymology of summer.

The trouble with automated grammar-checking software.

How baseball gave us jazz.

Dirty Words: slang and the Victorian fixation with dirt (PDF).

Are young women trendsetters in vocal patterns?

Interactive map of the world’s undersea internet cables.

The squabble over Pirahã.

[links archive]

Link love: language (40)

Below is a batch of language-related links (my 40th!) — some short, some long, mostly recent, a few from the archives.

Feel free to skip what’s familiar, ignore what doesn’t appeal, share what you like, or go off on a tangent in the comments.

Tarantula punctuation mark.

Does slang belong in school?

“Get your X on.”

Purposeless eye dialect.

Plagiary and plagiarism.

On the medieval origins of bookmarks.

Does your silent reading voice have an accent?

What countries are the most linguistically diverse?

Etymology-Man on tidal wave and tsunami.

A pronunciation pronouncement.

Is the subjunctive mood disappearing, and does it matter?

Cowslip: cow’s lip or cow slip?

The heartbreak of Random Capitalization Syndrome.

Erin McKean on arm party and other fashion vocabulary.

Inside the mind of a synaesthete.

How Charles Dickens helped shape the lexicon.

Why click consonants sound so different in English and African languages.

Zadie Smith on flexible accents.

Two-item sentence comprehension by a dog.

Paraprosdokian.

[previous links]

Link love: language (39)

The year is almost a month in, and I haven’t done a linkfest yet. So without further ado, here are some language-related items for your reading pleasure:

Carved book landscapes.

“Thou eunuch of language.”

Glossary of journalists’ jargon.

The thesaurus: a friendly warning.

How the hell do you use “the hell”?

F-bombs away! On curse words in the dictionary.

The mystery of poetry editing.

Henry Miller’s 11 commandments for writing.

William Safire’s self-contradicting rules of grammar and style.

How to write for an oral presentation.

The origin of web browser names.

Writing the end to an endless game.

The case for footnotes over endnotes.

Is the word sustainable sustainable? (Yes.)

When words are neighbours.

The strange case of Edward H. Rulloff.

How left- and right-handers think differently (PDF).

Bashtag.

[links archive]

Link love: language (38)

I expected my previous post to be my last of the year, but here I am with another. I was never much good at prediction.

Nonetheless: This will definitely be my last link love post of the year.

If you’ve been here before, you know the story: language-related links, some old, some new, some previously tweeted, all worth a click if you have the time and interest:

How supernovae are named.

Alphabet maps of Ireland and Great Britain

Tips for perfect proofreading.

Hearing the Great Vowel Shift.

“Part buzz, part groan”: lobsters talk to fish.

Comparing usage advice from two books on language.

And I’m like, read this! On quotative like.

Anticipointment.

How did groovy come to mean what it does?

When does terminology become jargon?

The psychology of pedantry.

Authors respond to a survey on symbolism.

The language of photography.

Zee and zed.

Merriam-Webster’s year in words.

Brocabulary and the dudeification of English.

Neil Postman’s exercise in etymology.

On the language used to advertise crisps (US: potato chips).

Dritok: a voiceless language.

[archive]

Link love: language (37)

Time for a selection of language links. Most are recent, some aren’t, all are good. Until next week, happy browsing!

Grotesque alphabet at BibliOdyssey.

Typos aren’t bad grammar.

Oxford commas and Chicago style.

Literary devices (cartoon).

Wrack or rack? It’s complicated.

The mystery of Edinburgh’s anonymous book art [update: continued!].

A language joke walks into a bar.

What are linking verbs?

“I’ve learned to give up when I hear Brooklyn in your voice.”

Some tips for self-editing.

Spaghetti or lasagne for linguists.

Celebrate Dudesgiving with Wordnik’s word soup.

Balinese: a language of many politeness levels.

The elusive ‘misplaced only’.

The politics of grammar and usage.

Phrases gone astray in the NYT newsroom.

The future of lexicography.

When it’s OK to correct grammar online.

The phonetic taste of coffee.

Does Google Translate speak “like a 10-year-old“?

Lost in translation: Lonely Planet‘s top picks.

Jean Aitchison, Language Change (Ch. 1, PDF).

[Language link archive.]

Link love: language (36)

If you’re new here, welcome, and if you’re not, welcome back.

Every 6–12 posts or so I gather a bunch of language-related links, old and new, long and short.* Slang is a recurring theme this time round.

 

On the language of Michael D. Higgins, Ireland’s new president.

Love among the participles.

Word surprise, or: What the hell kind of word is [X]?

How do you pronounce uilleann pipes?

Blogtailing betapreneurs: new words of forecasting journalism.

Slang is the pleasure principle.

Street slang – the dodgy-looking geezer.

Why do we use whose with inanimate objects?

Try to try out “try and”.

Assertionism: prescriptivism without evidence.

The Irish “strut”.

Punctuation is important.

Words of America: a field guide.

How language could have evolved without language-specific constraints (PDF).

 

The next few focus on Twitter, but don’t be put off if you don’t use it.

Maps of language communities on Twitter: Europe; world.

Is Twitter eroding language? (Clue: No.)

Twitterology, and on the front lines of Twitter linguistics.

Local Twitter slang, and all that jawn.

How pencils are made.

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* Also, if we can trust this man, “luscious”. Here are the archives.