Category: Writing and Language

Typographers are considering — hypothetically — the creation of new ligatures (joined type elements) to represent some L33Tspeak and chat abbreviations, such as “wtf” and “lol”.

Ligatures are letter forms that are joined for the purpose of making something that looks nicer. Look in a book or magazine and look at how “fl” and “ff” are joined. Similarly, diphthongs like “ae” and “oe” have ligatures set up for them, too. Most computer typefaces have such, but folks rarely actually make use of them except in extraordinary or typographically necessary situations (among other barriers, most spellcheckers don’t recognize them).

Technically, the ampersand — & — is also a ligature for “et”, the Latin for “and.”

Nobody’s actually considering creating such ligatures in fonts; it’s more of an “alternate universe” exercise, discussing how such typographical elements might have developed if the abbreviations become popular earlier in the language’s history. Fun.

(via BoingBoing)

The verb sic, as to sic a dog on someone, is spelled “sic,” though “sick” is also accepted.

The various conjugations can use either a double-c or a ck, e.g., “He sicced the dogs on the intruder” or “I’ll be sicking this Rottweiler on you if you don’t clear out now.”

While either the c or ck is used, the former is considered “better” in many circles, the latter a “well, a lot of people do it this way, too, so we have to mention it” variant. That may or may not be true (the OED seems to prefer sick as the older form).

It is a dialectical variation on seek.

Sources: 1 2 3 4

So I’ve been noticing this bus stop bench ad which asks, “PREGNANT? EMBARAZADA?” Which set me to thinking … does the Spanish word for “pregnant” really fundamentally mean “embarrassed” (as I started applying all sorts of cultural stereotypes about stodgy / traditionalist / Catholic Spaniards)?

Well, not really. There are some amusing stories one can hear about this false cognate between the two languages, but there is, ultimately, a common root between the two terms which is only metaphorical to either connection.

It is an important characteristic of linguistic borrowing that once a word is ‘borrowed’ into a language, it becomes the possession of that language and its meanings can be changed to suit that language. Even though a word may be borrowed with its meaning intact, with time, words that once meant the same thing in the languages of both borrower and lender drift apart, meanings are dropped, new nuances are added; the words take on an individual life of their own. For example, embarrassed and embarazada came, ultimately, from the same root. Italian imbarrare, meaning ‘to surround with bars’ gave rise to imbarrazzare, which became French embarrasser and Spanish embarazar, meaning ‘to hamper or impede’, and these in turn passed into English — embarrassed.

The original meaning of embarrassed is partly retained in the more old-fashioned sense of ‘in a difficult situation’ and is mainly used to talk euphemistically about financial difficulties. Feeling awkward or disconcerted is now the most frequent sense in English. Meanwhile, the Spanish verb embarazar has retained the original hamper or obstruct sense, but has the additional meaning of to make a woman pregnant. The adjective which is derived from this has only the pregnant sense. Embarazoso is the word to use to translate the English adjective embarrassed.

See? This is the sort of language stuff I love — two words that really mean two different things, but that wound their own separate ways from another word whose meaning you can still see in both.

(For the record, a number of other sources indicate that avergonzado is a better to word to use for “embarrassed” in Spanish.)

At any rate, regarding my particular fondness for lexical trivia, I refuse to be embarrassed.

Some great advice (and a bit that’s a tad finicky, too).

I certainly (at least at work) need to work on the brevity bits. Others need a lot of work on coming up with succinct but informative subject lines.

A fun BBC article about some interesting foreign phrases that don’t make it into the guide books or language classes. One of my favorites: the Japanese katahara itai, which means laughing so much you get a stitch in your side.

Good fodder for writing, as well as for roleplay.

(via BoingBoing)

On Mountweazel, esquivalience, and false entries in reference works designed to catch other reference publishers from wholesale copying — like Dictionary.com …

(via kottke)

I only encountered sentence diagrams once in my life, in the 8th grade, where my English teacher used them drawing on old books she’d recovered from the closets of the junior high (every school has old book closets, and they are often full of treasures).

I loved it. It was just the sort of geeky, rules-discerning, writing-related kind of thing that someone like me would get into. I don’t know that it would be helpful to everyone (not everyone is into grammar, and I’m not sure that formal grammar education beyond a certain level is terribly useful), but for some kids (and adults) it could really help provide an understanding of the language and its parts.

So it’s keen to seem someone else who liked them, too … with special bonuses in the comments of links for the Pledge of Allegiance and the Preamble of the Constitution …

It’s a dicey business in this day and age to write a novel about terrorism and terrorist attacks.

It gets even dicier when the book is published, in London, on 7 July.

As one of a growing number of works (such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) dealing with post-Sept. 11 terrorism, Chris Cleave’s first novel Incendiary was closely watched within the book industry. Cleave had already optioned the film rights in February. The book is being published in 15 or so countries. Print ads were ready for its July 7 U.K. release and posters for the novel were plastered throughout the London Underground.

Then the bombings occurred that same day.

All advertising was pulled by the publisher Chatto & Windus, a division of Random House. (The novel is scheduled to be released next month in Canada by Random House.) The ads showed the book’s British cover depicting smoke billowing up from a burning London skyline. Print ads for the book by British retailer Waterstone’s were also pulled, and Cleave has cancelled a number of appearances to promote the book.

Cleave is completely behind pulling the ads, but he’s not sure what to do next.

Yesterday, Cleave set up a website (http://www.chriscleave.com) asking readers about the novel, which is basically a letter to Osama bin Laden by a London woman who loses her husband and child to a fictitious terrorist attack at an Arsenal soccer game. “Is it disrespectful to the families of the victims for me to keep endorsing it? Or would it be a greater disrespect if I didn’t?”

Cleave says he’ll “do what people say. I really respect the opinion of readers in a situation like this.”

As they say, timing is everything.

(via BoingBoing)

The Dionaea House. Nice and spooooky. And it makes me want to write about a dozen things that would all seem terribly derivative …

(via Doyce)

In honor of our putting up Halloween decorations outside, Katherine told her friend, Old Tree Trunk (the huge cottonwood next to our driveway) a Halloween story. After, of course, she went through all the ritual (involving knocking and panels of bark opening up) of waking him up.

Continue reading “A tale of Halloween Horror …”