Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
A young student from China is Ireland-bound, and runs into a problem..agus faigheann sé amach go bhfuil an nach labhraíonn Gaeilge i bhfad Gaelic! 10 minute YouTube video, very funny and sweet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA0a62wmd1A
Twenty-ten or two-thousand-ten? Your thoughts.
….never hurts when you’re setting up your fonts and browser and such.
Coming Anarchy also highlights multiple historical places with the same name; Albania, Iberia, Alexandria, various African nations, and Guinea. They don’t have one for Galicia, but they ought to.
From the Coming Anarchy site: projected maps of Europe in the future and the former Yugoslav areas, along with their tag on microstates. Personally, I strongly doubt some of this; France has been doing a thorough stomp of its minority groups (linguistics-wise, especially) for the last 100+ years to Make Everyone Parisian, and the Bosniak [...]
What is your understanding of the following terms (multiple definitions accepted for this): snogging doppus redding hailing
I’m really amazed at the rapid speed I’m making through the VHS tapes. Part of that is that there’s a lot of the BBC stuff that is now available; I was absolutely shocked to find that the Tim Curry ‘Life of Shakespeare’ was available on DVD (I sweat blood finding the VHS). (Yes, I’m very [...]
Languages are a hot item of discussion at our house, because – well, there’s a big language gap here. Susan’s family is a mix of Norwegian, Danish and variations on British Isles, and there’s a little bit of the ‘Fargo’ Scandinavian-American accent there. Not much, mostly in word choice and the occasional ‘ya, sure‘ delivered [...]
(h/t to cakmpls) Laotian-American high school student in rural Iowa is seventh in her class with a 3.9 GPA, and school administrators are beating her up over her refusal to take a yearly Dick-And-Jane-Run-With-Spot-Run-Spot-Run test of her English abilities. The administrators point to the fact that her parents aren’t really very good in English, and [...]
“The way to a woman’s BLANK is through her BLANK“, the Obama’s dog will be a BLANK, Nixon and LBJ had worried opinions about the BLANKs all around them, as did the FBI Jefferson Davis had a BLANK spy in his home and Teaching BLANK language in Summer School can get dangerous. (h/t Deb Geisler)
In the same vein, there are names for countries that are given to them by their neighbors that don’t connect easily to what we’d call those countries in English. For example, a lot of tribes might call themselves ‘The People’, while a neighboring tribe would call them ‘those horse-stealing thieves to the West’. The tribe [...]
Many countries are called something in English that the people who actually live in those countries would never use (we don’t use Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika or Meiguo). The English names for these countries (or recently former countries), please: (Scoring: give yourself three points for each correct guess, and No Googling or Wikipediaing – [...]
Salon goes on about the latest business buzzword: “flat is the new up“, as in ‘hey, we may not be growing much, but the business at least hasn’t cratered.’ The BBC’s article about the ridiculous use of stupid business phrases, and how they’re usually mangled, and another article listing specific irksome ones from the readers…
…mit Fucker. Reisen mit 49 sitzplatzen…hey, there are no umlauts on this keyboard! Ratz.