It was a busy week at the sentence clinic; there was time for just one blog post, which featured a funny publishing anecdote and a curious law of fashion. Until I get round to another, here is some language-related reading and listening material for your enjoyment:
Architectural alphabets.
The virtues of the passive voice.
‘Ghetto grammar‘ is not the problem.
Railroad terminology and slang (with a great discussion at Language Hat).
Twanging with Lynne Murphy aka Lynneguist (audio).
Shakespeare insult kit.
+1’tastic: When a number becomes a word.
The hidden meaning of pronouns.
The lie/lay problem, or why “English morphology is a disgrace.”
Inscription at Persepolis.
Fifty concise writing tips (PDF).
Goldwynisms – the genuine, the phony, and the professionally created.
Swearing, euphemisms, and linguistic relativity.
Humorous units of measurement.
Connecting through a common third language.
Commonly confused words.
Typographic etiquette.
[…] to Stan´s link I read this beautifully written article in National Geographicabout the beauty of finding a common […]
That Persepolis inscription is a beautiful depiction of the formulaic nature of aphorisms.
Another excellent selection. I will be finding an excuse to use slubberdegullion as often as possible!
Ridger: Yes, exactly. Less beautiful but more amusing was how the formula got deconstructed in Mystery Men.
Jams: It’s a good one. A lot of old insults deserve better than obscurity, and Michael Quinion is right about slubberdegullion : “nobody hearing it could possibly consider [it] a compliment.”
Interesting post, as always! I truly enjoyed the Third Language article. I always thought that, with French, English and a bit of Latin, I always would be understood anywhere. This probably comes from a superiority feeling that Western people rule the world. Not anymore… How lost I would be in Asian and Arabian countries!
I’m happy to hear you enjoyed that article, Claude; I thought you might! There were times when my half-remembered German came in handy in (non-German) central and eastern Europe. Even a few words in common go a long way towards establishing camaraderie.
More recently, I read a book (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes) whose author had no language in common with the people of a village he moved into, and whose language, Pirahã, was then very poorly understood. He had to start from scratch.