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I've been packing up some of my books for storage this summer, and finding a variety of things stuck between the pages as I do—from old bills and paystubs to unused gift certificates and bookmarks from long-gone bookstores. In my copy of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot I found this delightful list of words and phrases:
I'd guess that all but a handful of these words were new to me at the time ("lineaments", though, I'd seen before thanks to an obsession with William Blake during high school), and even now I see several (like the timely "jobbery") that I really ought to make an effort to remember.
...the feeling you get when you stub your toe, right before it actually starts to hurt.
I'd say "dread", but somehow that doesn't quite capture the feeling. I suspect that German has the word I'm looking for. Like "sehnsucht", but not.
The CBC's web site includes and excellent monthly feature that discusses English usage (from a Canadian perspective, eh?): Words: Woe & Wonder. Is that flag at half-mast or half-staff? Why is the former leader of Iraq referred to as Saddam instead of Mr. Hussein? Delightful. [via metafilter]
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Jeffrey Veen brings us a few bits of information architecture jargon, including "Boil the Ocean", "Deep Diving", and "S2BU" (Sucks To Be You)...
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Clive Thompson asks, "Is txting killing handwriting?" And what does that mean for our cognitive styles?
Timothy Noah reviews Eats, Shoots & Leaves and tells us why nobody's learning anything from Lynne Truss:
Some people botch their punctuation because they lack a proper education, typically because they lack sufficient money to acquire one. Some of them botch it because English is their second language, and you never know your second language as well as your first. But the bulk of them don't know because they don't care. I wish they did, but they don't. And unless they plan on earning their living as writers, it isn't likely to hold them back very much, if at all.
Indeed. That's why, Noah suggests, the popularity of Truss' book has more to do with smugness than punctuation.
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Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the language of the Vietnam War (audio).
If you're having trouble communicating with your favorite networking geek or UNIX hacker, you might find The Jargon File handy.
(Today I talked to a sysadmin who didn't know what know what foobar was. What are they teaching the kids these days?)
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If you feel the need to bone up on your grammar but find The Elements of Style a tad too dry, The Celestial Grammar might be just the thing you crave. Written with the contributors of alt.sex.stories.moderated in mind, it's sure to improve the next dirty story you write. (And, if so, you'll send me a copy, won't you?)
Incorrect: I should have lain the key to the handcuffs out of her reach before I left the room.
Correct: I should have laid the key to the handcuffs out of her reach before I left the room.
[Thanks to R for this one.]
Steve Silberman has made available the reading list from Literary History of the Beat Generation, a course taught by Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute in 1974. Links to online copies of the readings are included where possible. [via boingboing]
Another delightful word seems to have been coined when I wasn't looking.
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Get your daily dose of Engrish! [via Language Log]
Are today's students being taught by lobotomized weasels to write like lobotomized robots so they can be graded by computers? Crispin Sartwell seems to think so:
Obviously, if your no-child-left-behind funds depend on your test scores, you will teach your kids to write essays that move a computer to tears. But the idea that computers can grade essays in the first place is one that could only have occurred to people who have no idea how to write or how to read, people whose existence is redundant and hence indefensible: in short, the people who administer the education of our children.
[via Reason]
A group of volunteers has undertaken an interesting project to provide information for the Oxford English Dictionary on citations for terms used in science fiction.
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A delightful new phrase, courtesy of popex.com: "love chess".
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As reported yesterday by ZDNet UK and others, and confirmed in detail at snopes.com, the County of Los Angeles has determined that "[b]ased on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County" the terms "master" and "slave" as used to refer to primary and secondary drive controllers are "not acceptable identification label[s]".
The mind boggles.
Wait until someone explains DNS servers to them...
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Good news for logophiles! OED Online recently added a new monthly subscription plan for individuals. It's still too expensive for me, but it's very tempting.
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More new jargon: "Joe Job". The concept has certainly been around a long time, but I've only started seeing this term used fairly recently. (Of course, I haven't had time to keep up with Usenet in years, so maybe that's why.)
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New jargon I've been seeing a lot lately: "cartooney".
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