Friday Fun: You can’t say “sh” in Spanish
This 4-minute TED Talk explains how the lack of “sh”explains why we use the letter X to mean “the unknown.” You know like Planet X. X-ray. Gen-X. X-Men. X-rated.
Cheers!
This 4-minute TED Talk explains how the lack of “sh”explains why we use the letter X to mean “the unknown.” You know like Planet X. X-ray. Gen-X. X-Men. X-rated.
Cheers!
As the academic year begins in US institutions of higher learning . . . I couldn’t resist sharing this comic from xkcd. Last year, faculty in my College were in an uproar over a redesigned website created for an external audience. The furor has died down now that most of the content for the internal…
If you need evidence that people feel passionately about language, check out a plain language summary of research published by Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics at Monash University in Australia. The summary appeared today in the Linguistics Research Digest, a terrific resource for locating more than platitudes about communication. Their goal is “to provide up-to-date reports on the…
Writing is a 5,000-year-old technology developed for commercial purposes like keeping a record of agricultural products. Ancient Scripts is an awesome resource to learn more about the world’s writing systems. This TED Ed lesson is a brief introduction. Speaking came thousands of years before writing. All writing that has developed since its invention can be traced…
Thanks to the folks at Bridging the Unbridgeable, I learned that the CIA style manual is now publicly available. As the Director of Intelligence wrote in the foreward to the 8th edition, The information the CIA gathers and the analysis it produces mean little if we cannot convey them effectively. I’ve included the manual here so you can investigate for yourself. The…
The Center for Plain Language recently released final grades for US federal agencies. After completing a rigorous evaluation process, they concluded that Participation by agencies in the Center for Plain Language Federal Plain Language Report Card reached an all-time high: 23 agencies submitted materials for review, including all 15 Cabinet-level departments. Compliance scores increased overall: Eight…
I am a linguist who studies workplace language. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain that I don’t speak lots of languages. (The fact that I wish I had learned to earlier in life is a separate issue altogether.)That definition of a linguist is used almost exclusively within government, especially in…
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