Temblor

This word has bothered me for years.   It seems like every reporter writing up an earthquake feels compelled to use it, even though no one else in the world (for the most part) ever does.   I always chalked it up to news editors and their seemingly insanely over-the-top desire for "snappy" writing.   Finally, someone has run the numbers:

"A quick search on Mark Davies’ Corpus of Contemporary American English shows that temblor occurs just over twice as often in newspaper writing as in magazine writing, and more than three times as frequently in newspaper writing as in fiction."

Full article...

What about Chinese phonebooks?

David Moser, in Mark-Twain-like fashion, takes out his frustration on the Chinese language:

Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.

[...]

I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character [for] "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character.  Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??

The entire essay...

Passive Resistance

Geoffrey Pullum shows up with a list of names, and all out of grammatical bubblegum:

"Merriam-Webster reports an average of about 13-percent passives in newspapers and magazines (which they note is much lower than the 20-percent rate they find in the classic 1946 essay by Orwell warning against passives). And here we have double that percentage, in the writing of an academic who imagines that she avoids passives! But this is where modern American writing instruction has brought us. Totally unmotivated warnings against sentences that have nothing wrong with them are handed out by people who (unwittingly) often use such sentences more than the people they criticize."

Full article here...

ht: Language Log

Demetri Martin: "if i"

So, Demetri Martin is what most people would call a stand-up comedian.   You would think that during one of his shows, you'd hear stand-up comedy.   This show, however, is something else entirely.   Along the way through palindromes and unicycles, we get some serious introspection and the beginnings of a meditation on law and grace (though I don't know if Mr. Martin would see it in those terms).   I don't know exactly how to describe it, but in the words of Pedro Sanchez from Napoleon Dynamite, "I'd like to see more of that."  

Here's a link to a Youtube playlist of the whole show.   Be advised, like most "stand-up comedy", this show contains some profanity and "thematic elements".  

WP: Chinook Jargon in English

"British Columbian English and Pacific Northwest English have several words still in current use which are loanwords from the Chinook Jargon, which was widely spoken throughout the Pacific Northwest by all ethnicities well into the middle of the 20th century. These words tend to be shared with, but are not as common in, the states of Oregon, Washington, Alaska and, to a lesser degree, Idaho and western Montana."

Tolkien: "English and Welsh"

J.R.R. Tolkien:

Mr. C. S. Lewis, addressing students of literature, has asserted that the man who does not know Old English literature 'remains all his life a child among real students of English'. I would say to the English philologists that those who have no first-hand acquaintance with Welsh and its philology lack an experience necessary to their business. As necessary, if not so obviously and immediately useful, as a knowledge of Norse or French.

Read the essay (PDF)...

English as She Is Spoke

So, it's the 1880s, and your friend is making money with his Portuguese guide to the French language.  Why not just grab a French-English dictionary, flip the French phrases into English, then sell the result as a guide to English for Portuguese speakers?   From the book:

Familiar Phrases

• Go to send for.
• Have you say that?
• Have you understand that he says?
• Put your confidence at my.
• At what o'clock dine him?
• Dress your hairs.

and

Here is a horse who have a bad looks.  He not sall know to march, he is pursy, he is foundered.  Don't you are ashamed to give me a jade as like? he is undshoed, he is with nails up; it want to lead to the farrier.

Poor horse. Read it for yourself...