A history of Esszet (ß).
Belgium’s divided tongue.
How to decline a manuscript.
The giddiness of god-possession.
Medical graphology: symptoms in script.
The mysterious origin of the skeleton in the closet.
Don Watson on language as a home (PDF, 117 KB).
Aggregating advice: OnlineStylebooks.com.
A recursive link to a recursive link.
A novel phonology of pooped.
Tautological place names.
Swoose and sweese.
How to mistype Tony Fuller.
Hating and loving Frankenwords.
Raising the question of “begging the question”.
A complete failure of translation at Fawlty Towers:
Sentence first 
Was it terribly shallow of me to go for the Fawlty Towers video first?….
Not at all, Fran. It’s an irresistible show. Some of the links are very short, but for the sake of appearance I arranged them by length instead of weight!
I love this part !! it encapsulates every step of a (funny)”langage de sourds” moment abroad : translation first, then another person interfering, then exaperation, then justification : “I learnt clasical Spanish” ! trop drôle, thanks !
De rien, Alice, et merci de votre visite. Vous avez raison: de l’espagnol classique à la comédie classique!
Here’s what some English-speaking people tell me (when they can’t converse with me in my language, and follow my excellent Montréal French): “I speak Parisian French!” Je leur dis, imitant à perfection le français de France, “Alors, parlez-le, sacrebleu!”
Looking forward to examine all your links. I will be back.
Comme tu es drôle, Claudia! Merci pour l’anecdote.
Though it’s not exactly related, seeing ‘tautology’ reminded me of one of my wordages (which I don’t believe I’ve posted to my blog yet):
Taunted in Taunton
Franked in Berlin
These are just some
Of my favourite things
Thanks for the verse, absurdoldbird. Since your comment has a link, love, and language, it’s plenty relevant (and even if it weren’t, I probably wouldn’t mind). Coincidentally, I was writing about place names today. They can be very curious.
Indeed they can. There’s a place we drive through a few times a year called ‘Staylittle’ and another called ‘Clatter’. Clatter has a noisy road, but I suspect that may just be coincidental. I wonder, though, about the other place…
Those are wonderful names! One finds the most amazing place names just by wandering around or browsing a map. Staylittle seems to be suggesting that visitors stay a little while, but I suppose it might equally indicate that people stay very little. That’ll be the stubborn optimist in me.
A few comments on the links.
– I remember conversations on the Internet in which Germans criticised the particulars of spelling reforms while insisting that a bad reform was better than none at all. I found that a striking cultural difference from the Anglo world.
– On Brussels, I can’t resist mentioning the humorous allusion by Michael Flanders, which is paragraph three in this collection of quotes.
– “I Still Call Australia Home” is indeed one of those national songs that’s been over-used to the point of becoming a rather irritating cliche. Do you feel that way about any Irish songs?
– I remember the Frankenwords article. I find that intellectuals often object to neologisms that involve combining, say, Greek with Latin roots, calling them “hideous” and the like, but it’s an attitude I’ve never understood. To me, it’s as silly as objecting to a meal because it contains ingredients native to two different continents.
Dragon: There are a few Irish songs that have become, for me, what you call an irritating cliché. The Fields of Athenry, for example, is a poignant ballad but it gets wheeled out at almost every available sporting or drunken opportunity. Some songs have little or nothing explicitly to do with Ireland or Irishness, but have been widely adopted as collective anthems, e.g. Olé, Olé, Olé, which I wouldn’t mind never hearing again.
I find the “barbarous” morphology objection as silly as you do. It seems like intellectual indulgence of a pointless peeve.
Your “recursive link to a recursive link” led me to “A Walk in the WoRds” and an interesting article on Canada’s (sometimes imposed) bilinguilism. Many thanks! Also for all other links, some very amusing.
Is the Lexiophilia’s vote result today?
Bilingualism…?
My pleasure, Claudia. It was an interesting article all right, and I’m sure visitors to A Walk in the WoRds will appreciate your insight into bilingualism.
Lexiophiles will announce the results of their poll/competition on Friday, I think.
You´ve probably heard this before: in the Catalonian channel (you know, Barcelona is Catalonia´s capital), Manuel’s wasn´from Barcelona but from.. Mexico.
The funny thing is that I read somewhere that the french tv made him a mexican too. Was it the moustache?
pep: I had heard it, but I had forgotten. Given Manuel’s moustache and general appearance, I suppose there are only a few countries from which he could credibly come. Some other country made him Italian, I think. There was probably a bit of political prevarication before his ‘new’ origin was decided upon. It reminds me of the Eurovision.
[…] Stan Carey circles up a list of tautological place names: […]