April Linkfest

I’ve added Ruth Wajnryb’s blog, Words Woman, to my blogroll, and I recommend that you bookmark it, too. Ms. Wajnryb is an Australian linguist who writes in an approachable and open-minded manner about new words, new meanings for old words, word play, and, yes, the addition of heart (v., tr.) to the OED. I first cited Ms. Wajnryb several years ago in a post about the migrating meaning of “erstwhile.”

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Speaking of migrating meanings, Ben Yagoda, writing for Slate, considers the “nonplussed” problem, along with “momentarily,” “disinterested,” and “presently.”

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More multiple meanings: Take the Language Log polysemy quiz. And read the rest of the post, in which author Geoffrey K. Pullum asserts, using boldface for emphasis: “Languages love multiple meanings. They lust after them. They roll around in them like a dog in fresh grass.”

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What are blancmange, fish slice, pong, and skivers—all words from the British English lexicon—doing in So Much for That, a novel written by the American Lionel Shriver and set in the US? Jan Freeman explains. (P.S. So Much for That is one of the best novels I’ve read in the last five years.)

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“[W]hichever speechwriter came up with ‘win the future’ should be sent to count yurts in Outer Mongolia.” – Paul Krugman on President Obama’s budget speech.

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OK, we know that “Eskimos have a hundred words for snow” is a fallacy. But it turns out that English speakers have dozens of words for rain, from “ablaqueate” to “whisp.” Read them all in Ben Schott’s pluviovocabulary.

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Got 10 minutes? Watch an episode of “The Beauty of Maps,” a BBC documentary that originally aired last year. The series is a guided tour through the British Library’s collection of 4 million (!) maps. (Via Swiss Miss.)

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Speaking of maps, Muckety uses fascinating interactive maps to chart “the relationships of muckety-mucks”—i.e., people with power and influence, including Martha Stewart, LeBron James, and former Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. Register at the site to create your own Muckety. Vocabulary bonus: “muckety” derives from “high-muck-a-muck,” a corruption of Chinook jargon “hayo makamak” (literally “plenty to eat”—by extension an important person). Chinook jargon was a Pacific Northwest trade language that was used well into the twentieth century.

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“Can I legally get myself tattooed with a sports team’s logo?” Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope tackles the intellectual-property implications and concludes: it depends.

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How would a linguist translate “Dumber than a box of rocks” from the original Texan? Easy: “Dumber than a department of Sapir-Whorfians.” There’s a whole mess of useful conversions in “Texan for Linguists,” a possibly non-peer-reviewed article in Speculative Grammarian, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”

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And speaking of flavorful Texas expressions, I’m partial to “Don’t just sit there looking like a tree full of owls,” from Maud Newton’s “Like We Say Back Home.” (Via Stan Carey.)

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Battle is for boys, love is for girls: the unsurprising-yet-still-discouraging sex-stereotyped vocabulary of toy ads, depicted in word clouds. (Via Arnold Zwicky.)

Comments

[Ben Trawick-Smith]

I'm also quite fond of SpecGram's tranlation of “Ain’t nothin’ in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos” into “Ain’t nothing in the middle of the mouth but schwas and dead languages."

[Jessica]

I think there's a conspiracy of Bens in the language world: Yagoda, Schott, Zimmer, and Mr. Trawick-Smith above me here. Coincidence?

P.S. Thanks for the Lionel Shriver tip. I loved "The Post-Birthday World."

[Nancy Friedman]

@Jessica: Then of course there's the ur-Ben, Benjamin Whorf.