Not a good word for crossword puzzles but great for Scrabble

NPR's Robert Krulich on how one word can have many many different spellings.

Mackerel, by the way, was originally an old French word, "maquerel" but when the Normans conquered the British (or was it the Angles and Saxons?) in 1066, they brought maquerel into the English language where it got bounced around quite a bit. James Gleick, the science writer, says the OED in 1989 listed 19 different mackerel spellings down through English-speaking history.

Nineteen is a lot different names to call a fish.

But when you consider that most people were illiterate, there were no dictionaries, and no notion of "correct" spellings, it would have been highly unusual for only one spelling to predominate. 

...

In its 2002 edition, The Oxford English Dictionary almost doubled the number of ancient mackerel spellings. Why?

Blame the internet.

After 1989 the internet made it easier for historians and antiquarians to scan, publish and exchange old documents. With a bigger database, all kinds of new/old spellings turned up.

Not what you say, but the way that you say it

Climate scientists gathering at a conference on Arctic warming were asked Wednesday to explain the dramatic melting in the region in layman’s terms, the Associated Press (AP) reports.

An authoritative report released at the meeting in Copenhagen showed melting ice in the Arctic could result in global sea levels rising 5 feet within this century, much higher than previous forecasts.

James White of the University of Colorado at Boulder told fellow researchers to use plain language when describing their research to a general audience. Focusing on the reports technical details could obscure the basic science. To put it bluntly, “if you put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it will get warmer,” he said.

US climate scientist Robert Corell said it was pertinent to try to reach out to all members of society to spread awareness of Arctic melt and the impact it has on the whole world.

“Stop speaking in code. Rather than 'anthropogenic,' you could say 'human caused,” Corell said at the conference of nearly 400 scientists.

The Arctic has been warming at twice the global average in recent decades, and the latest five-year period is the warmest since measurements began more than 100 years ago, according to the report by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.

English B in dee hanz of boofuns

It's called Copy Editor's Disease, where the sufferer's need to make corrections in grammar, spelling and syntax becomes insufferable. They are usually very funny too.

Another bit of pre-Columbian America to disappear

Very few remnants of the tribal past exist. The Guardian (UK) documents the evaporation of another one: There are only 2 fluent speakers of a Mexican indigenous language and they're not speaking to each other.

The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known as Mexico for centuries. It has survived the Spanish conquest, seen off wars, revolutions, famines and floods. But now, like so many other indigenous languages, it's at risk of extinction.

There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other's company.

"They don't have a lot in common," says Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist from Indiana University, who is involved with a project to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco.

The paper links to UNESCO's list of endangered and extinct languages 

Words matter, pick them carefully

But paying in dollars may not be wise

In Kuala Lumpur, the government tax agency's website is in the Malaysian national language and English ... only. They're working on Mandarin. The site had a link to the Google translation function, but it was disengaged.

A poem on punctuation without using any

On Punctuation
by Elizabeth Austen

not for me the dogma of the period

preaching order and a sure conclusion

and no not for me the prissy

formality or tight-lipped fence

of the colon and as for the semi-

colon call it what it is

a period slumming

with the commas

a poser at the bar

feigning liberation with one hand

tightening the leash with the other

oh give me the headlong run-on

fragment dangling its feet

over the edge give me the sly

comma with its come-hither

wave teasing all the characters

on either side give me ellipses

not just a gang of periods

a trail of possibilities

or give me the sweet interrupting dash

the running leaping joining dash all the voices

gleeing out over one another

oh if I must

punctuate

give me the YIPPEE

of the exclamation point

give me give me the curling

cupping curve mounting the period

with voluptuous uncertainty

via Writer's Almanac "On Punctuation" by Elizabeth Austen, from The Girl Who Goes Alone. © Floating Bridge Press, 2010.

It's not just the words themselves

David Rakoff's essay in the NYTimes discusses the language used in his contacts with his medical professionals.

It has taken years for me to learn not to analyze the voices and vocabularies of those taking care of me. For the most part, I’ve been very lucky even as I’ve been less than fortunate. The doctors and nurses in my life don’t prolong the anticipation with pleasantries. We joke around a lot, but that’s the second order of business. With a long illness, there are stretches of triumph that feel like cosmic rewards for good behavior followed by inexplicable setbacks that seem like indictments of your character. With so much muddy logic crowding out reason, it’s best when news, good or bad, is delivered quickly and clearly. I will forever be grateful to my oncologist for opening the door and saying, “Damn it, the tumor’s 10 percent bigger,” before he even said hello.

Typecast

Boy talk

A study out of Michigan State University shows that building language skills has a greater impact in boys than in girls in regulating their behavior.

“It shouldn’t be chalked off as boys being boys,” Vallotton said. “They need extra attention from child-care providers and teachers to help them build language skills and to use those skills to regulate their emotions and behavior.”

It can be hard to make yourself understood

It was Clowns in clownface vs Clowns in Brown Shirts and the pretend clowns came out on top.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

What does English look like?

A NSFW example of kinetic typography from a scene in "Pulp Fiction."

Cartoons' laughter dubbed in different languages

That's "South Park" (of course with swearing) and an unembeddable "Simpsons" is here (of course with snarkiness).

Germany finds acting like America is hard

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said attempts to build a multicultural society have "utterly failed." 

She said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate - including learning German.

That country that was divided by war is having problem living  at peace with itself.

He says one language unites us, and stumps for votes in Spanish

Florida's GOP candidate for US Senate, Marc Rubio is on the English-only bandwagon and campaigns in Spanish.

N. Korea speaking in English

North Korea -- a place where few speak English, few have computers and even fewer still have internet access -- has opened an English language website. Not only that, the totalitarian state is more hip than your mom:

"... it has strengthened web propaganda by opening accounts at popular websites like YouTube and Twitter."

Oblivious to the novel allusions

US English awarded an "A" to members of Congress who supported the group's xenophobic paranoia about the alleged fragility of English.

“Nearly every congressional district in the United States is experiencing an increase in the population that struggles with English.”

Forget that America was discovered by a guy exploring for Spain

The OC Weekly (Orange County, Calif,) reports that the city planner in a Spanish-named town, with city designs inspired by Spain, doesn't like Spanish-based street names because he can't pronounce them.

Historically, Mission Viejo has had street names drawn from Spanish. After all, the Dispatch points out, the city's original developer sent representatives to Spain in the 1960s to get design ideas for the new master-planned community.

The issue came up at a planning commission meeting, leading Lennar to submit a new batchof more Mission Viejo-ish names, like "Via Cielo" and "Via Panorama."

Planning commissioner Robert Bruchmann, though, wishes they'd kept the old names. Here's part of his letter to the Mission Viejo Dispatch:

"Frankly I liked the initial submission of names [by Lennar], mainly because I can pronounce them."

A law without power to solve a problem they don't have

The town of Forty Fort, near Wilkes-Barre, PA, intends to pass English-only law despite it having no power and there being no need, according to the Times Leader:

"... the ordinance is powerless in insulating the borough from action dictated by higher governments. While he did not know of any Pennsylvania state or federal laws requiring municipal documents be printed in languages other than English, should such a law be made, Dyller said, Forty Fort would be bound to follow it, ordinance or not.

“It doesn’t insulate them from anything,” he said. “What it does is tell Hispanic people: stay out.”"

Getting it wrong so often as to be right

University of Pennsylvania's  Language Log reports that the single most authoritarian source of English words, the Oxford English Dictionary, has added the word "eggcorn" as a variant of "acorn" since misuse has become so entrenched that the misused word is the embodiment of a whole category of misuses.

As early as 1844, people were reinterpreting the word “acorn” as “eggcorn”, either deliberately, for humorous purposes, or in all innocence, in a struggle to analyse, in a way that made sense to them, what the word’s spelling must be: acorns are, after all, seeds which are somewhat egg-shaped, and in many dialects the formations acorn and eggcorn sound very similar. Since 2003, it has become a widely accepted term for this category of words as a whole, appearing in books and journals, and on the internet, often alongside its musical sibling, the mondegreen or misheard lyric (which first appeared in the OED in 2002). As such, it has now become an autological word: one which belongs to the category it describes.

English was just one language of the 13 colonies

So many people spoke German at the time of the country's creation that a bill was offered at the time to have laws printed in that language. That story got twisted into the apocryphal tale of German nearly being the official language of the United States.

DEA be wantin' a Prof. Henry Higgins

ABC News reports the federal government is searching for an Ebonics translator.

Such experts, he said, would likely be used -- as with many federal linguists -- to assist with wiretaps and linguistic profiling, when a person's accent or dialect can help lead investigators to the criminal.

"They probably want reliable expertise to make sure they've got an accurate interpretation for what is said," he said."Because there's the perception in many minds that you don't need a translator, people believe they've understood something when they haven't."

We bark, mewl, buzz and parrot

Just because there's a fly in the butter, doesn't mean it's a butterfly. A cat is hardly like a catfish, nor a dog like a dogwood, and ditto for a floxglove and fox. Then we can start on idioms: cat out of the bag, no dog in that hunt, flygirls, and foxy lady.... and some folks think that first and second generation immigrants should just cope with the language's oddities and still expect them to interact with government and business at the same level as others.

But being America means giving everyone equal access to the opportunities and benefits of democracy.

"You won't need some of these words for months and months"