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December 31st, 2010
January 16th, 2008
08:54 am
Linguists put the shine on Strine: "Try these new words, in the Macquarie Dictionary, for today's language lesson: credit card tart, tanorexia, salad dodger, floordrobe, silent disco, lady garden, Chindia, carbon footprint, grapple tackle." (Of these new Australian words, I myself have only ever heard "carbon footprint".)
'Subprime' is word of year 2007 according to the American Dialect Society.
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December 24th, 2007
09:58 pm
The British Medical Journal, which seems to have gone insane for Christmas, reports on the blackly humorous slang used by doctors. How much of this has been invented and how much collected from the field I cannot say.
I encountered the word stoater in Christopher Brookmyre's novel Quite Ugly One Morning (which I strongly recommend to anyone on a diet). This Scottishism is usually used to mean a particularly good-looking woman, but in the novel, an especially bizarre and difficult murder case was dubbed "a real stoater".
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December 17th, 2007
06:45 pm - Languages Other Than English
Lekoudesch, a secret language of German Jewish cattle traders
More on Norf'k
Linear B
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September 21st, 2007
09:09 pm - Languages
Aloha and Mahalo: two of the most important words of the Hawaiian language
Aboriginal languages help more stay on: "Learning an Aboriginal language - in addition to English - will become compulsory in schools with large indigenous populations under a State Government strategy to improve Aboriginal retention rates and literacy standards."
Languages on critical list: "MORE languages are at risk of dying out in northern Australia than anywhere else on the planet, according to researchers who have identified the world's five top "hot spots" of endangered indigenous languages." Read more at the Living Tongues Institute site.
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August 28th, 2007
08:35 pm - From Hunter S. Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear"
witchbag - "There was a carelessness in the way this case was handled that led us to a witchbag of strange problems within the law-enforcement system."
flag-sucker - "The Democrats had lost another election and Bush was still the new President. But not much had changed since the 80s, when the looting of the Treasury was in high gear and the U.S. Mikitary was beginning to flex its newfound money-muscle. When, everywhere you looked, the flag-suckers were in charge."
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February 12th, 2007
09:16 pm
"But coming back to Albania, [learning other languages] was a form of keeping yourself sane, it was a way of keeping up with the rest of the world and what was happening beyond the confines of the place that you were confined to. And it felt very much like a confinement, I grew up in a place that was confined, you could not really move very much, there was a kind of grounding. Because you couldn't leave, at least your imagination, your fantasy, you could imagine other worlds by the languages you spoke, you could at least construct a different understanding, a different reality based on language; the concepts they use, the way in which words and sentences and even meanings were constructed."
- Interview with interpreter and translator Erik Lloga
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February 5th, 2007
05:25 pm - Vanishing Languages: Ladino
An interview with the English translator of In Search Of A Lost Ladino - Letter To Antonio Saura by Marcel Cohen. The book includes a glossary of Ladino terms, many of which are left untranslated; I wish the transcript of the interview had included some of these including the elegant "a cucumber's ass" for "nothing".
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December 21st, 2006
07:59 am - Shed language
The uk.rec.sheds FAQ is full of entertaining words, including the newsgroup's own coinages, several terms from The Meaning of Liff, and the following:
marplot - an interfering busybody who mucks up your plans
esculent - edible
outwith - outside [I heard David Tennant use this in an interview. Is it a Scotism, I wonder?]
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