The Onion Radio: Rules Grammar Change
Posted by Anne on March 2nd, 2010Nonsense rules!
Archive for the 'language' Category
Pigeon: Impossible
Posted by Anne on February 22nd, 2010Pigeon Impossible, the silent animated film by Lucas Martell released on 9 November that took 4 years to make, passed the 1 million views mark on YouTube after less than 2 weeks online. The film is set in the neighborhood of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., where two of my nieces and I [...]
Question: When does remixing become second-hand living?
Posted by Anne on February 13th, 2010Germany has been rocked by scandal this past week, as Helene Hegemann, the 17-year old writer of an astonishing novel called Axolotl Roadkill, has been shown up by Munich blogger Deef Pirmasens (Gefühlskonserve) to have lifted whole passages of her book from the writings of one Airen, a blogger in Berlin. Her publisher had asked [...]
Snowclones
Posted by Anne on February 8th, 2010I’ve just learned from Stan Carey what a snowclone is. Geoffrey Pullum developed the concept on Language Log back in 2004, for a clichéd phrasal template that gets repeated in innumerable variants.
Geoffrey Pullum:
“I was looking at things like “In space, no one can hear you X”, where the customizability is that you get to choose [...]
The iThing
Posted by Anne on January 27th, 2010I broke my vow not to hang out on Twitter. Well, I had a fun conversation about the iTablet iThing Apple is unveiling today, asking what people thought it should be called. I thought iPad would work. Andy H thought they should go with iLash, or iShadow, iBrow, or iDrofoil. The iDrofoil? a waterproof version? [...]
Jean-Paul Nerrier’s Globish
Posted by Anne on January 26th, 2010This is a comment on a great post by The Tesla Coil on the Graddolization of EFL. David Graddol honored MELTA with a visit last summer. Thanks, Tony Watt for the Globish link:
Only 4% of the people communicating with each other today in English are both/ all native speakers. Jean-Paul Nerrier wants to “make it more [...]
Q is for question
Posted by Anne on December 17th, 2009I have a question. Ich hätte da mal ‘ne Frage.
Dear Germans, liebe Freunde, we English speakers sometimes complain that you can be so direct that it’s almost rude. And yet you have the very charming habit of adding that little introductory phrase, I have a question, when you want to ask one. It’s almost [...]
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