More on More on Spoonerisms, Chairs of Bowlies and Thimilar Sings

Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing (Podcast)

Russell Frank's blog Spankly Freaking

Away With Words and Wordworking

Dave Brondsema

The Wunder Blog and their Daily Bug posting titled
Balking Tackwards

VKpedia

The Grumpy Old Man has some Pedantic Moans in this direction and gives a nice list of Spoonerisms

Goonerisms Spalore! has a list (Parental Guidance recommended)

Joho the Blog has an on-the-borderline list (Parental Guidance definitely recommended)

Home is where The Horse is in the posting The man behind the muddle talks about Spooner

and see, generally,
Figures of Speech
with "Many definitions from: The American Heritage ® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from InfoSoft International, Inc. All rights reserved."

Spoonerisms and other Verbal Blunders: Um ... by Erard

Um ... er .... ah. Having trouble speaking or writing? Do you suffer from lips of the stung? Do you sometimes write there for their? You are not a loan. The process of communication by words is beset with surprising linguistic obstacles.

Micheal Erard is "a journalist who writes mainly about language at the intersection of technology, policy, law, and science." He has a new book out Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.

Erard talks about those slips of the tongue that befall most of us at tome sime or another. It is an instructive world of verbal blunders made famous in our own day by US President Bush's "Dubyaspeak", which led to Erard's Um.

But the problem of dubyaspeak is older than President Bush. Former US President Herbert Hoover was, for example, also famed indirectly by a spoonerism, a lexical flip by radio announcer Harry von Zell, who referred to Hoover once as Hoobert Heever (read this account as a general lesson in evidence).

In his review of Erard's book, Dennis Lythgoe at the Desert Morning News writes as follows about "Um" and "Dubyaspeak":

"Erard became interested in the subject of verbal blunders during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush’s malapropisms were referred to as “abnormal” in media reports. Erard thought critics were too hard on Bush, because he believes all of us commit verbal blunders.

He is convinced that making mistakes in speech is not a sign of a lack of intelligence. It is often caused by anxieties — people repeat words and restart sentences if they’re nervous. Or they may simply be accidental."

That may in part be confirmed at the blawg Yayarolly goes to law school, where "a 30-something's adventure in law school writes" in "Stick a fork in 1L, I'm done":

"Seriously. I'm tried. That's really the only way to describe what I am feeling right now. Not euphoric, not relieved, just tired. And a little concerned if my speech will ever be the same again... I've been spitting out spoonerisms over the last week like it's going out of style."

For more details about malopropisms , spoonerisms, and similar verbal blunders, see these reviews of Erard's book.

Wordgloss : The Meaning and Origin of Words

The following is our book review of Jim O'Donnell's book, Wordgloss : A Cultural Lexicon , which we have reviewed at Amazon.co.uk:

"Was this the wish of the Demiurge? Boston to Washington DC is a conurbation! Cui bono?! Do we live in a lexical dystopia awaiting a thaumaturgic gloss revival? Who today knows that "pleonasms are tautologous and should be avoided"? Errata need not be repetitive - a verisimilitude!

Do you need this book? Do you know the words?

Author Jim O'Donnell (book Foreword by John Banville) writes in his preface that "the extraordinary expansion of modern knowledge and its fission into micro-specialties" has created "a niagara of words and concepts flowing from a wide range of disciplines that we have never explored."

The everyday result is that our increasingly sophisticated modern world of communications is confronted by the Hydra-headed cultural stumbling block of a classics-based "verbal universe" manifesting an erstwhile lexical heritage to which most readers no longer have any personal or educational connection.

Wordgloss is not a quintessential corrective panacea for this problem, but O'Donnell writes that "Wordgloss is full of the words and concepts you always meant to look up. It tells you where they came from and how they acquired the meaning or meanings they now have."

The book is written "associatively", which is "pedagogically" more effective than the "linear" scientific style of dictionaries.

Definitely a fun and educating vade-mecum read.

Fons et origo!"

Word Freak Paul Muldoon

Charles McGrath in his exceptional New York Times article Word Freak, informs us about the remarkable poetry of Paul Muldoon. McGrath writes:

"Just about everyone except Muldoon thinks his poetry is often difficult. When I suggested to him once that his work is sometimes hard to follow, he shook his head and seemed almost offended. “I’m not all that keen on the idea that every poem should be full of allusions,” he said, and he added that what he strove for always was clarity. “It’s mostly a matter of clearing away,” he said. “The way Frost did.” But then after a pause, he added: “It’s hard to make a poem these days that is absolutely clear and direct — if the poem is really to be equal to its era. This is not an era in which clarity and directness, however much we hope for them, are entirely justifiable, because so much is unclear and indirect. I’m not just talking about willed obfuscation and crookedness, though, God knows, there’s plenty of that. I’m just talking about a realization that very little is as it seems, that everything has within it massive complexities — maybe even the inappropriateness of being certain about things. A proper awareness that things are just not at all as they seem — one would wish for more of that, particularly on the political front. Wouldn’t you love to hear the president or someone say, ‘Well, you know, I’m not absolutely clear on that’?”"

Muldoon is also the member of a rock band, Rockett, which sings lyrics written by him. McGrath gives the following example from “Meat and Drink,” a love song from the band’s second CD, “Standing Room Only,” which contains this stanza:

"I’m through with hitting the sake
With Kenzo and Miyake
I’m done with Valpol and polenta
With Oscar de la Renta
Now the joint is pastry-cased
Enough of the modus vivendi
Of Ferragamo and Fendi
No mooching through Balducci’s
With Pucci and Gucci
Finding nothing to my taste."

Hey, this guy is really good.

Business Jargon - Green Weenies and Due Diligence

Dana Sanchez at The Herald in Bradenton, Manatee and Sarasota, Florida (thank you Bradentonians for this tip) has an article "Using a language that works: Jargon makes the business world go round", reviewing a book documenting business jargon, written by auto salvage magnate Ron Sturgeon and entitled "Green Weenies and Due Diligence". It is an education.
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Truthiness and Podcast Words of the Year 2005

Well, we have said it along about the humanities, and now it has hit the world in general.

Via email from Bradenton, Florida (thank you) containing snips of articles in The Herald, we discover that The American Dialect Society (ADS) in its 16th annual words of the year vote, has chosen "truthiness" as the Word of the Year 2005, i.e. as the word best reflecting the year 2005. According to the ADS:

"Truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."

It used to be that we now call "truthiness" was simply "wishful thinking".

That same society also voted "podcast" as "the most useful word" of 2005, with podcast defined as "a digital feed containing audio or video files for downloading to a portable MP3 player. From the brand name MP3 player iPod + broadcast."
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WebCorp Linguistic Search Engine

WebCorp is part of a linguistic search engine developed by The Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES).

RDUES, "based in the School of English at UCE Birmingham, is a small team of corpus linguists, software engineers and statisticians. We carry out applied research in corpus linguistics, developing new descriptions of the language in use and tools for the extraction and management of knowledge in databases. The Unit's linguistic background is broad: corpus-based linguistics, lexicography, applied linguistics, the study of modern English language, modern languages, TEFL."

Webcorp is capable of creating word concordances of website pages.
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Word Magazine - Entertainment and Music

Word Magazine - Entertainment and Music

Via Blognor Regis:

"I read every issue of the music monthy Q Magazine from January 1990 through to this spring when I'd finally had enough of the constant top 100 this, that and the other polls. I'm not sure whether I've outgrown the magazine or whether the magazine has gone downhill. I think the latter because the editors of Q back in the day, Mark Ellen and David Hepworth (who, famously, was once in a band at Oxford called Ugly Rumours with our present Prime Minister) now produce a magazine called Word."

Word Magazine writes about itself:

Word has already established a reputation as the most authoritative grown-up magazine in the entertainment and music market. Industry figures and readers have applauded the quality of its writing and presentation and its refreshing approach to its subject.

This sounds good enough that we might buy a copy.

Working With Words - Blog

Working With Words - Blog

The blog Working With Words carries the following description:

"A weblog devoted to spurring a conversation among those who use words to varying degrees in their daily work. Hosted by John Ettorre, a Cleveland-based writer and editor...."

This blog is a great addition to any blog roll for its postings on the literary world of writing and reporting.

We would, however, recommend, that the blog author post his personal political opinions to a different blog devoted to political topics. Here, they just get in the way....

Tibetan Orthography

The blog Kuro5hin has a posting by rtmyers entitled Introduction to Tibetan Orthography, showing the problems which are raised by convoluted systems of word orthography but also being a nice discussion of Tibetan, including its relation to Sanskrit.

The Scrabble Rack

Finally, a tool to end all disputes about whether a Scrabble ® word is legal or illegal and whether the dictionary being used is the right one or not.

Go to The Scrabble Rack.
Plug in a word. The column (frame) at the right tells you whether the word is legal or illegal.

Mother Tongue May Be Older Than Many Think (washingtonpost.com)

Mother Tongue May Be Older Than Many Think (washingtonpost.com)

The clueless linguists keep looking for the mother tongue of Indo-European in Turkey (Anatolia) rather than in places like the Baltic or elsewhere IN EUROPE or Central Asia where the Balts may originally have come from.

Funny, the Turks today do NOT speak an Indo-European language.

Andis Kaulins Scrabble Score

Pholph's Scrabble Generator My Scrabble© Score is: 17. What is your score? Get it here.

Berlin Blog - Pearls lost Forever

Berlin Blog is on the blog roll of our main site, Law Pundit. The reason is not only because the blog owner has a legal background, but because she writes so beautifully. A good sample is found to close out the year at Oh, right. The Poop.

"There are eight or so teenagers in my house. They have been here since Friday. Plus my brothers. And their wives.

I have lost two posts, and my mind. At the end of every day, the kids, who are otherwise scattered from Germany to Long Island to Ohio to Wisconsin, gather all four portable computers on the dining table and instant message with far away friends, and, weirdly enough, each other. Yesterday again I tried to post. I stuffed the computer into a linen closet and typed while pretending to get ready to go to the grocery store for the 17th time. I hit the post and publish button before realizing my wireless was in a dead zone. Pearls, absolute pearls, lost forever."

All of us have probably lost posts in the course of our computer travails - perhaps it just goes to show the ephemeral nature of words. Some words - said - last an instant, some words last for some time - written, but no words last forever.

Death Sentence, The Decay of Public Language

TheAge.com.au brings us a review by James Button of the book, Death Sentence, The Decay of Public Language, by Don Watson, in which language is seen - to quote TheAge - as
"being mangled by the globalising forces of obfuscation".

As written by Button,
"The book charts how "managerial language" has infiltrated the English of politics, business, bureaucracy, education and the arts."

And as Watson writes:
"[E]very day we vandalise the language, which is the foundation, the frame, the joinery of the culture, if not its greatest glory, and there is no penalty and no way to impose one. We can only be indignant. And we should resist."