Link love: language (67)

A selection of items and bite ’ems of linguistic interest found around the internet in recent weeks. Some are short, some long; all are good, or at any rate interesting. Three are from The Toast, because it’s toast <sniff>.

Nifty is a nifty word.

The birth of a book cover.

The linguistics of Black Lives Matter.

On the use – and overuse – of the dash.

How a modern multilingual army works.

Nicknames and gender in medieval England.

Mom and dad as new internet slang.

A short history of swearing.

Emoji aren’t a language – they’re more like gesture.

What what3words (now official in Mongolia) tells us about words.

Link love: language (66)

I haven’t done language links in a while, so I’ll share this set before it grows to an even more unwieldy size. The series is a sample of the links I share more regularly on Twitter, plus a few I haven’t. Happy reading.

Upside-down N.

A typeface made of trees.

How to make text look futuristic.

The language faculty that wasn’t.

The case for Black over African American.

A book known to the world only in translation.

Why does Britain have such bizarre place names?

Nouns that become verbs act as vivid linguistic shortcuts.

Gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals.

We don’t just see the world differently – we hear it differently too.

Link love: language (65)

It’s almost two months since my last batch of language links: definitely time for another. It’s a smaller pile than usual, and some of them are short. But if you’re still pressed for time, think of it as a lucky dip.

Ootland.

Drownded.

The Water Glossary.

The early history of Ms.

A guide to air punctuation.

Profanity as Weltanschauung.

The rise of non-binary pronouns.

The rules of totesing are totes intch.

Inside the minds of real-time translators.

Where did the Australian accent really come from?

What’s the difference between language and dialect?

The internet is legible to speakers of just a few languages.

There’s a village in Bali where everyone knows sign language.

Seamus Heaney on his early sense of ‘verbal music’.

What do we visualise when we read fiction?

MRI scanner video of a woman singing.

Dictionaries and how we use them.

Of Mice and Men, a found poem.

A bad year for blasphemers.

Pronouncing Diplodocus.

The revival of smeuse.

And cheeseling.

Beware of writing tics.

Shakespeare Confidential.

Why do we say Once upon a time?

Wherefore pleaseth archaic English?

Journal of Language Evolution – a new publication.

How far back in time can we find evidence of deafness?

On the sociolinguistic significance of Martin Luther King Jr.

Murder in 1876 over the pronunciation of Newfoundland.

Irish isn’t ‘compromised’ – it just needs more support.

Monco – a useful new language corpus.

Why designers love the ampersand.

Back to prep(osition) school.

Star Wars style guide.

The smell of Latin.

Compassion fade.

Of Oz the Wizard – The Wizard of Oz in alphabetical order:

Older language links here.

Link love: language (64)

A recurring series asks, ‘Will you still read me, will you still tweet me, when I’m sixty-four?’ I hope at least that you find a few items of interest in this batch of language-related links from recent weeks.

The story of Ogham.

On holding one’s head.

Oliver Sacks and the OED.

A 17thC irony mark, revived.

A short guide to Hindi profanity.

On the use of mate in Australian English.

A survey of spoken Irish in the Aran Islands.

Who were the first people ever recorded in writing?

Finding new language for ‘unmanned’ space missions.

Link love: language (63)

For your weekend reading and viewing pleasure, a selection of recent language-related links from around the web:

Love letters to trees.

How to design a metaphor.

Two medieval monks invent writing.

The United Swears of America, in maps.

On the political power of African American names.

Asperitas: the first new cloud name since 1951.

The emerging science of human screams.

Telegraphic abbreviations of the 19thC.

Secret language games, aka ludlings.

Managing weight in typeface design.

Zodiac signs for linguists.

A stone talking to itself.

Link love: language (62)

For your weekend-and-beyond reading pleasure, a roundup of language-related items I’ve enjoyed over the last few weeks:

Gibberish as a tool of empowerment for girls.

Rewilding our language of landscape.

Historical slang terms for money.

Ghost of editor past (cartoon).

What part of ‘No, totally’ don’t you understand?

Ending utterances with a comma is definitely A Thing.

A corpus of 25,000 early English texts is now openly available.

The amazing story of the Doves Press typeface.

Old proverbs we should use more often.

Swearing around the world.

Link love: language (61)

It’s a couple of months since I did a language linkfest, so before it gets out of hand again here’s a selection of linguistic and word-related items I’ve enjoyed over the last while.

A dictionary of hip-hop slang.

On the history and pragmatics of ping.

The future will see fewer, and simpler, languages. (Or will it?)

The global language network.

Spelling reformers get the wrong end of the stick.

Geniorum octopodes? A pedantic guide to borrowed inflections.

The Ling Space: videos introducing linguistic topics.

How old is the nickname Mike?

Using strikethrough for communication.

Celebrating the survival of aboriginal languages.

26 language writers on their favourite portmanteau words.

What are the best things to use as a bookmark?

Bae is an adjective and a verb now.

Did Celtic languages influence English grammar?

How the language of TV shows sheds light on their structure.

If you need another reason not to listen to Nevile Gwynne.

How and why does the English language change?

The language of convenience stores.

Not all likes are alike.

A short history of the pilcrow (¶).

A short history of the octothorpe (#).

Feminism and the language of football.

13 words of the year from other countries.

Research suggests bilingualism reduces essentialist beliefs.

Authors protest the omission of nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Signalling the intent to signal.

For crying in the sink, let’s euphemize!

Hawaiian pidgin word hapa (half-white, half-Asian) has ameliorated.

Why did people start peeving about “book entitled”?

Behind the scenes at Merriam-Webster.

Bringing Webster’s unabridged dictionary to market in 1864.

Wine words and their history in Australian English.

The case for dropping the term pathogen.

The hidden language of ~the tilde~.

Eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious.

Hashtagification.

Men, women, and language:

*

Want more? See the language links archive for 60 prior installments.