Living Tongues Institute
Check out this site and what they are doing to preserve dying languages and what you can do to help!
A lovely site on cohesion, coherence and information flow for those who are struggling to understand it.
We’re already a couple of days into April, but there was lots of great writing about language on the internet last month, and here are some of our favourites.
It’s been a big month for Australian language. The Australian National Corpus was launched, and while it currently only has around 3000…
This is a really great read for those of you who are struggling with stress in prose.
I thought that since I was in Warsaw I would make this week’s TwwEh Poland-appropriate. The 24 hours since I got here have been rather hard on my brain; three years of Nepali have squeezed out most of my Polish, and it’s rather embarrassing when Nepali words come out instead of Polish ones.
One…
Spooning is now wrecked in my eyes…
7. Spooning
Used primarily in a romantic sense these days, spooning is an arrangement of people that visually resembles nested spoons. Eighteenth-century slave traders used the term to describe a specific slave packing arrangement when boarding African slaves on ships to cross the Middle Passage.
\SAT-uhr-nyn\ [adjective]
1. Gloomy or sullen in disposition; morose; sluggish; grave
2. Having a sardonic or bitter aspect
3. Born under or being under the astrological influence of the planet Saturn
History & Origin
Saturnine (mid 15th century) literally means “born under the influence…
Excerpts of doublespeak from an article on the government’s Insulation scheme.
Whatever you might think about Colin Smee’s individual philosophy, you won’t hear the word insulation in the official halls of power these days. It has all but disappeared from the language of government and bureaucracy across the land: a banned word.
With winter approaching and government ministers from Julia Gillard down falling over themselves to purge the term ”carbon tax” and replace it with the much friendlier ”clean energy future”, the absence of virtually any reference to insulation might, if you had been hiding under a rock for the last couple of years, seem curious
When you hear a government talking about temporary anything, it’s always best to substitute the word ”permanent”.
But that would mean unbanning a banned word, and worse, for the Gillard administration, reviving memories of the unmentionable Rudd period.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/no-ifs-or-batts-on-the-banned-wagon-20120316-1vatf.html#ixzz1pKI3VDSo
“Failed to fulfill wellness potential” and “Chronologically experienced citizen.” Suddenly, my Public Speaking book became hilarious.
Link of the day goes to this description of the etymology of “shambles” - it’s a word rarely seen today without the intensifiers “complete” or “total” in front of it, but what exactly is (or was) a shambles? Click through for The Phrase Finder’s theory.
Sanskrit dictionaries list several words for loving, arranged in order of both intensity and degree of attachment. Snehah meant fondness, anurahah implied devotion, while manmathah was reserved for passionate and presumably sexual commitment. Priyate simply meant to love someone, and priya…
