Pigeon: Impossible
Pigeon 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?
http://annehodgson.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/remix.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadGermany 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 […]
Snowclones
I’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 […]
The iThing
I 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
This 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 […]
Q is for question
I 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 […]
K is for knock
First on my “K” list is “knowledge”. But I’m afraid I’ve overdosed on clever quotes and clichés for the next decade or so. Go someplace else if you want to talk about knowledge. Knock, on the other hand, is a great word. In English we knock on wood for good luck (how about you? and […]
