I am so guilty of this...

Well, I did know one

Any pagan worth their salt knows 'widdershins'. But still...I love archaic words (as you can no doubt tell). I must start using these right away. Here in Kentucky, 'swullocking' is especially appropriate, although oddly enough, it's not to bad right now.

19 AMAZING ENGLISH WORDS WE’VE TOTALLY FORGOTTEN ABOUT

She's exactly right, and I use this way too much myself

Google Exec Reveals the One Word Women Need to Stop Saying If They Ever Want to Be ‘Respected’

“Yet I began to notice that “just” wasn’t about being polite: it was a subtle message of subordination, of deference. Sometimes it was self-effacing. Sometimes even duplicitous.”

“As I started really listening, I realized that striking it from a phrase almost always clarified and strengthened the message.”--Ellen Petry Leanse

There are a lot of comments on the the Internet like, 'don't tell women how to talk' or 'there's no data to back this up'. It was never a scientific study, it was based on anecdotal experience. But it doesn't mean women shouldn't be more assertive in their language--we undermine ourselves easily in all sorts of way in the business world and beyond. There's nothing wrong with suggesting that we think about how we say something and how to make it stronger.

Interesting

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Midland

 

"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.

 

The West

 

The South

 

Boston

 

The Inland North

 

North Central

 

Philadelphia

 

The Northeast

What American accent do you have?

I grew up in the deep South [Louisana/South Carolina], California, Kansas, and Kentucky, with parents and all other family back to about 1790 from Kentucky. I guess all that moving around made for a lack of accent, although people from Minnesota say I sound Southern. I blame the kids in California for beating the Louisianan accent out of me and forcing me to conform. [And no, I'm not actually kidding about that last part.] Thanks to CJ Applegate Stonehocker for sharing this on her page.

How do kids get a great vocabulary? By adults using words around them

(and reading, of course).

How ‘Shrek’ Persuaded Me to Let the Words Fly

“Shrek” inspired me to let the words fly around my children. Nope, I’m not talking about the movie “Shrek”, but about William Steig’s wonderful picture book “Shrek.” And I’m not talking about using curse words around my children, but about using a more sophisticated vocabulary in ordinary conversation.

The vocabulary in “Shrek” is extravagant. It’s so baroque that I did some research to find out why Steig had included phrases like “shady copse,” “churlish knave,” “rosy wens,” and “fusty fens.” Had he picked words at random from a dictionary and challenged himself to work them into his story? Did he have pet underused words that he was determined to bring back into favor? (I myself have waged a losing campaign to popularize “chirk.”)

I love words, especially those which have unfortunately fallen out of favour these days. And I have never understood why we talk down to children who are capable of handling words that have more than five letters or two syllables.

I learned a lot of my vocabulary through reading, as opposed to hearing folks talk. I didn't always get the exact meaning, and a few things I terribly mispronounced the first time I used them. I used to read dictionaries for fun, too. YKWIA insists that I have an idiosyncratic use of words at times despite that. That may be. But the best way for kids to learn is to hear the words used (correctly). And in an era of mangling language online (I read instances of 'my advise' rather than 'my advice' yesterday in comments on a news story, for example, and I'm beginning to wonder if anyone can use 'loose' or 'lose' correctly these days, their misuse is so ubiquitous), it is terribly important to reiterate the importance of words.

This is so cool

Dialect Map of North America

I wonder what they'd make of my accent, having grown up in all sorts of states, mostly in the South, but including the West and Midwest?

Thanks to Maria Popova for the link.

I'd love to decipher their words

Robots develop language to 'talk' to each other

Robots are developing their own language to help them navigate and improve their intellectual ability.

The Lingodroid research project lets robots generate random sounds for the places they visit in both simulations and a real office.

The "words" are shared and the robots play games to establish which sound represents which location.

The lexicon has proved so sophisticated that it can be used to help robots find places other robots direct them to.

The machines are being allowed to generate their own words because human language is so loaded with information that robots found it hard to understand, said project leader Dr Ruth Schulz from the University of Queensland.

Different cultures view time differently, but there are indications this one has no real concept of time as we do

Amondawa tribe lacks abstract idea of time, study says

"We're really not saying these are a 'people without time' or 'outside time'," said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

"Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events," he told BBC News.

"What we don't find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don't have a notion of time which is something the events occur in."

The Amondawa language has no word for "time", or indeed of time periods such as "month" or "year".

The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community.

But perhaps most surprising is the team's suggestion that there is no "mapping" between concepts of time passage and movement through space.

Essentially they didn't believe him because his English is poor

but he was born in the United States. He just spent a lot of his childhood in Mexico. But considering he had several forms of legitimate identification, it's a shame that they pressured and deported him.

Wrongfully deported American home after 3 month fight: U.S. birth certificate wasn't enough to persuade border authorities

A Texas-born U.S. citizen who was detained, questioned and deported to Matamoros, Mexico, in the middle of the night has been allowed to re-enter the United States, ending a nearly three-month ordeal.

Luis Alberto Delgado, 19, was carrying his American birth certificate, Social Security card and Texas ID when he was pulled over in a routine traffic stop on June 17, according to Houston immigration lawyer Isaias Torres, who represented him in his legal battle for repatriation.

A South Texas sheriff’s deputy who apparently believed the documents were not authentic handed Delgado over to U.S. border agents. After eight hours of questioning, Torres said, Delgado felt pressured to sign a document agreeing to voluntary removal from the country and waiving his right to a lawyer. The Border Patrol then drove Delgado to Matamoros and left him, he said.

Granted, he did sign a document allowing them to deport him, but I'm not sure how much he understood about what was happening. At nowhere in the article did it mention whether he was given an interpreter. There are plenty of citizens out there who have broken English at best (and not just Spanish-speakers), and although that's a debate in and of itself, it's no reason to throw someone out of a country where he was born and had a completely legal right to be working and living.

Weeding words

Speaking of the English language, the following words are being purged from Britain's Collins English Dictionary as archaic and obsolete to make room for new entries. I figure as long as they're in the OED, they're still official. And as you've no doubt noticed, I have a penchant for archaic words and spellings anyway. :)

Abstergent, Agrestic, Apodeictic, Caducity, Caliginosity, Compossible, Embrangle, Exuviate, Fatidical, Fubsy, Griseous, Malison, Mansuetude, Muliebrity, Niddering, Nitid, Olid, Oppugnant, Periapt, Recrement, Roborant, Skirr. Vaticinate, and Vilipend

For lots of 'obscure' words, try Luciferous Logolepsy, a great site devoted to them.

A quiz before sleeping

Can't remember if I've done this one before:

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English 25% Dixie 10% Yankee 0% Midwestern 0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?