- The key difference between a calque and a loanword is that a loanword isn’t translated into English whereas a calque is. – surprisingly not via kottke, although he posted it, too!
- Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are television writer/producers with over forty years of combined experience — on shows including Lost, Firefly, Sleepy Hollow, and Helix — and they have a great podcast.
Should We Be Punching Nazis? You already know where I stand on this.- My sons and I love Cautionary Tales, the Tim Harford podcast about mistakes and what we should learn from them. (He’s also written a children’s book, The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up.)
- Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality
- Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
- What are Progressive Web Apps?
Posts tagged “language”
#FridayFive: Handy Latin Phrases
in aqua scribis
nikhedonia, noun: The pleasure and satisfaction derived from the anticipation of success. A harmless indulgence, and a prudent one, too, since success comes only to some but nikhedonia is freely available to all.
“Off to golf so early, darling? Hadn’t you better have your little nikhedonia session first? You know how badly you play when your gummata are troubling you.”
from The Superior Person’s Book of Words, by Peter Bowler
#FridayFive: My Favorite Words with Friends Words
View the Friday Five from February 14th, 2014
Pentametron scours Twitter looking for tweets that are in iambic pentameter and then combines them into sonnets.
I can’t stand when people say, “I could care less.”
“I could care less,” is one of those little things that drives me absolutely batshit crazy. If you could care less, it means you care. That’s not what you mean when you say that, is it? What you mean is that you don’t care. Someone posted this handy little graphic in a discussion forum and it really helps. (Click it to see!) Do you get it now?
How to Handle a Ducking iPhone
For some reason that makes little sense, Apple decided to not include one of the words I use most frequently in the iPhone’s internal dictionary. So if I ever send you a text message saying that something is, “ducking awesome,” or that you need to, “get the duck out,” that is why. A certified Apple
Whether or Not
The words or not never follow the word whether. That’s it. That’s the rule. Whether implies or not. You don’t ever need to say both of them. The words or not should never be spoken. (They should certainly never be written.) Whether implies “or not”. Get it?
Wonderful Phrases
These all need to make a comeback
WordPress Gunning-Fog Analysis PlugIn
In which I build a quick plugin