The Week: Most Recent Language Posts

Learn Klingon in 6 steps

The Week — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:15:00 -0400

Ha! So you think you have the fortitude to learn Klingon? Yes, yes, go on with your "clever" jokes about "geeks" "wasting time" in their "parents' basements" or whatever the weak and insecure do when they realize they do not have what it takes to master the language of Wil'yam Shex'pir. Do you know what the very first lines of the very first Star Trek movie were? It was back in 1979 and some of you may not have been born yet, so I will tell you. They were "wIy cha'! HaSta! cha yIghuS!" The subtitles read "Tactical… Visual… Tactical, stand by on torpedoes!" But much was lost in the...

Palindromes, anagrams, and 9 other names for alphabetical antics

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 06:55:00 -0400

If you love word play, you probably know that a word — or longer piece of writing — that reads the same forward and backward is called a palindrome. But what do you call a word that spells another word backwards, or a word that looks the same upside down? When terms for these orthographic puzzlers didn't exist, logolologists (such as the authors of the books listed below) were happy to invent some. Here are a few:

1. Isogram
A word in which no letter of the alphabet occurs more than once. Dimitri Borgmann's longest example: dermatoglyphics, the study of skin markings or...

18 delightful words from the final season of The Office

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:00:00 -0400

1. Belsnickel
Belsnickel is "a crotchety, fur-clad Christmas gift-bringer figure in the folklore of the Palatinate region of southwestern Germany," and is "preserved in Pennsylvania Dutch communities." The name comes from the German pelz, "to pelt," and the name Nikolaus. See also Krampus.

Example: Dwight: "What about an authentic Pennsylvania Dutch Christmas? Drink some gluhwein, enjoy some hasenpfeffer. Enjoy Christmas with St. Nicholas's rural German companion, Belsnickel?"
— "Dwight Christmas," December 6, 2012

2. Bildenkinder
Bildenkinder is a nonsense German word which translates...

The delights and frustrations of off-road grammar

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 08:40:00 -0400

One of the amazing things about language is that it lets you express thoughts that have never been expressed before and describe situations that may never have been imagined.

Even so, in any language there are some kinds of thoughts, and not necessarily new or unusual ones, that the grammar rules don't give you an easy way to state. If you think of your language as a vast and sprawling place, then your grammar is the network of roads that allows you to get to where you want to go. And these troublesome thoughts are areas that are just beyond where the sidewalk ends, just past the Dead End sign...

11 baby-naming trends of the past

The Week — Tue, 14 May 2013 06:43:00 -0400

Last week, the Social Security Administration released its list of the most popular baby names of 2012. Jacob and Sophia made the top of the list this year, but the SSA website has data on the 1,000 most popular baby names for boys and girls going back to 1880, when John and Mary came in first. A look at the old lists shows that the most popular names are always changing, but some of the naming trends have been around for longer than it might seem. Here, 11 naming trends of the past:

1. Important titles
This year's list has some names that carry a grand sense of importance (Messiah, King, Marquis...

Why babies in every country on Earth say 'mama'

The Week — Sun, 12 May 2013 08:58:00 -0400

Every language has a word for water. In Swahili they call it maji. In Dutch Danish, it's vand. The Japanese say mizu. Even though these words describe the most common and plentiful life-giving substance on Earth, they have nothing in common linguistically. But why should they, evolving as they did on three separate continents among people with incredibly diverse histories and traditions?

But there is a word, and only one, spoken the same way in nearly every language known to humankind. That word, of course, is "mama."

"Mama" is a universal word, describing the woman who gave us the most...

The week in words

The Week — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:00:00 -0400

Welcome to this week's Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news and culture.

With the premiere of the latest movie version of The Great Gatsby, the 1920s were on a lot of minds this week. The OxfordWords blog discussed the language of jazz; Ben Zimmer explained how baloney got phony; and Katy Steinmetz at Time told us why F. Scott Fitzgerald is all over the dictionary.

Author Haruki Murakami discussed translating The Great Gatsby into Japanese. Flavorwire rounded up some beautiful Great Gatsby covers, and we...

The language Isaac Newton invented

The Week — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:10:00 -0400

Isaac Newton laid the foundations of modern science. He discovered gravity and the principles governing motion, light, and cooling. He invented a reflecting telescope, counterfeit-proof coins, and calculus. Most of his work made a huge and lasting contribution to the state of human knowledge, but a few of his projects never made it any further than the paper they were outlined on. All generations that came after him would benefit from his innovations, but none of them would ever speak his universal language.

When Newton was a young student just beginning college, he drew up plans for a language...

Our favorite bits of 1920s slang

The Week — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:35:00 -0400

No doubt: The 1920s were the bee's knees. But the ads banking on the latest film adaptation of The Great Gatsby would have you believe the Jazz Age was all about flappers, fashion, and parties. It was more than that.

After World War I, Americans had more money to spend. That combined with "low prices... and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries" in the early 1920s; by the end of the decade, "they were practically necessities."

With "a car in every backyard," automobile-related language entered the everyday lexicon. There was step on it, as in "step on the gas" or hurry up, in ...

15 less-than-inspirational quotes from a book of moral advice

The Week — Wed, 08 May 2013 06:52:00 -0400

Charles H. Spurgeon was a nineteenth century Baptist preacher whose London sermons were attended by thousands at a time. The sermons were transcribed and published, and every week, thousands of copies were sold for a penny apiece. He also published dozens of books. One of his best-sellers was a book of moral teachings written in a "rustic style" for the benefit of "ploughmen and common people." It was essentially a collection of popular quaint sayings such as "what's good for the goose is good for the gander," organized around themes like "On Patience," "On Gossips," and "Thoughts about Thought...

The 15,000-year-old ancestral language that birthed English and Russian

The Week — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:47:00 -0400

"Thou."

Okay, maybe the word alone doesn't sound like much. But according to new research from Britain, "thou" may be one of the most enduring breadcrumbs of language in human evolutionary history.

In this study, a team of linguists from the University of Reading found clues that many modern languages — including but not limited to English, Russian, Portuguese, and more — descended from a single ancestral tongue some 15,000 years ago. "Everybody in Eurasia can trace their linguistic ancestry back to a group, or groups, of people living around 15,000 years ago, probably in southern...

11 spam comments that look like drunk thesauruses

The Week — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:00:00 -0400

In general, spam comments are not designed to make you click on a link, but to have that link left sitting somewhere on your page. The idea is that in searches, Google will rank the spammer's site higher because there are a lot of pages out there linking in to it. The challenge for search engines and spam filters is to separate the genuine from the spammy, and the challenge for the spammers is to find a way to keep their comments from getting filtered or deleted. As filters evolve, so do the spammers. These days, in order to get through the filters, a comment should not only look plausible, but...

English spelling is terrible. Other languages are worse.

The Week — Mon, 06 May 2013 07:19:00 -0400

English spelling is crazy. Even people born and raised in English-speaking societies who speak no other language still often have a lot of trouble with English spelling.

You may think that English is unique in its spelling insanity. For instance, Spanish spelling is very consistent and phonetic. And even languages that look weird have rules that they generally don't break. Right?

Right some of the time, yes. But not right all of the time.

The same factors that make English spelling so bizarre can also come into play in other languages. Some languages have pretty dodgy spelling. Some have...

Where did the phrase 'come out of the closet' come from?

The Week — Sun, 05 May 2013 10:30:00 -0400

NBA center Jason Collins recently announced he was gay in a cover story for Sports Illustrated. In other words, he "came out of the closet." This expression for revealing one's homosexuality may seem natural. Being in the closet implies hiding from the outside world, and the act of coming out of it implies the will to stop hiding. But though the closet has long been a metaphor for privacy or secrecy, its use with reference to homosexuality is relatively recent.

According to George Chauncey's comprehensive history of modern gay culture, Gay New York, the closet metaphor was not used by gay...

The Kentucky Derby: A brief guide to hat-related words

The Week — Sat, 04 May 2013 11:30:00 -0400

How would you describe one who is wearing a hat? You could say hat-wearing, or you could say galericulate, which means having a little galea, which is Latin for something helmet-shaped.

If you remove your hat to show respect, you're practicing hat-honor. The term was "used by the early Friends or Quakers, who refused to pay this token of respect." Along those same lines, to be unbonneted means to be without a bonnet but also "making no obeisance" or gesture of deference or honor.

Need to buy a hat? Visit a milliner, one who "makes, trims, designs, or sells hats." The word probably comes from...

13 cool new words we learned from TV in April

The Week — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:29:00 -0400

1. blood eagle
The blood eagle is "a method of Viking ritual execution" mentioned in skaldic poetry and Norse sagas. Whether or not such a practice actually took place is disputed. Not surprisingly, Blood Eagle is also the name of a band, specifically "a heavy rave trash duo."

Example: Jimmy: "Vikings used to execute Christians by breaking their ribs, bending them back, and draping the lungs over them to resemble wings. They used to call it a blood eagle."
— "Coquilles," Hannibal, April 25, 2013

2. catarrh
Catarrh is an "inflammation of a mucous membrane, especially of the air-passages...