Greetings, fellow wordniks! It’s time again for our weekly language blog roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news.
Earlier this week, The New York Times rounded up their 50 most looked-up words from January 1 through July 14 of this year. Topping the list is panegyric, “a eulogy, written or spoken, in praise of some person or achievement; a formal or elaborate encomium.” Words that also appeared on the NY Times’ 2009 and 2010 lists are inchoate, opprobrium, and hubris.
Also in the Times this week was Ben Zimmer with a piece about forensic linguistics, used to help prove the authorship of texts, while Fast Company reported on a study on the detection of gender patterns in Twitter.
The Boston Globe discussed the banning of Creole in Haitian schools. Meanwhile, over in Manchester, England, a department store has “banned staff from using words they believe sound ‘too Mancunian‘” when speaking with customers, such as hiya, see ya, and cheers, and demanding they use only hello, goodbye, and thank you. Mark Nichol at Daily Writing Tips considered some other taboo words, while Slate defended a speech tic that, um, some think should be banished as well.
Meanwhile, the debate over “irritating” Americanisms continued with part two of a post from Lynneguist, some words from Grant Barrett of A Way With Words, and some thoughts from Stan Carey.
The prolific Mr. Carey also had posts on the expression open kimono, and the ongoing fuss over the word ongoing. Lynneguist, aka Lynne Murphy, posted at Macmillan Dictionary blog on how Americans might want to handle small talk in the UK.
Robert Lane Greene at Johnson taught us how to do a bad southern accent (“Sookie!”), how to use mixed metaphors badly, and how to use them well. From Grammar Monkeys we learned how to correct others’ grammar with a smile, while the Yale Grammatical Diversity project is seeking to document the “syntactic diversity found in varieties of English spoken in North America.”
Our own Erin McKean wrote about why dictionaries make good novels; the A.V. Club listed 11 movies that give language a twist (“Well, smurf me with a chainsaw” is going on my tombstone), and fiction writer Jennifer Egan turns a list into a story, or a story into a list (what’s the diff, we like them both).
Arnold Zwicky explores boldly going, discusses a few unsatisfactory portmanteaus, and how even euphemistic exclamations can be offensive to some. The Virtual Linguist took a look at the British saying, as you do; a lot of words for toilet; and slang initiatives in Wales and Scotland. The Dialect Blog wondered why so many fantasy movies and shows are done with British accents, and mused on animal accents and vowel shifts. K International examined the translation of movies, as well as languages in New Guinea that have fallen silent.
Fritinancy reviewed the names of fake chicken (or chikn?) products. Every Station gave us some words from London’s Victorian underground (just a few of our favorites dollymop, lushington, and gonoph). Mental Floss detailed 15 words for which there is no English equivalent (though we’d argue that for number eight, the Turkish gumusservi, “moonlight shining on water,” there is one: moonglade). Gothamist let us know that Scrabble street signs will be back in Queens, New York this fall.
Finally we wanted to congratulate Sue Fondrie for writing 2011’s worst sentence in English and winning the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction annual bad writing contest. Without further ado, here is Ms. Fondrie’s winning entry:
Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
Ah, those bloody, sparrow-like pieces of memories, I know them so well. (“Sookie!”)
Till next week!