Wordorigins.org

Ben Zimmer in his Word Routes blog has the story behind finding the earliest known use of the form of address Ms.

McKean’s Law (also known as Gaudere’s Law or jocularly as Muphry’s Law) states, “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” This past weekend this law was succinctly and humorously demonstrated by Pat Buchanan criticizing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for her attempts to improve her English as a young student at a meeting of an anti-immigration group while standing underneath a banner that read, “2009 National Conferenece.”

Those who advocate for English as a national language of the United States are, at best, ignorant of the facts about immigration and language acquisition and, at worst, are racist.

And never mind the hypocrisy in Buchanan’s argument. He wants everyone to speak English, but when a woman (American-born, not even an immigrant) who has grown up in a Spanish-speaking household in New York wishes to improve her English skills, he derides her attempts to do so. 

One of the perks of reviewing books is that publishers send you free copies. So I was surprised and pleased when I got a copy of Ralph Keyes I Love It When You Talk Retro in the mail. I’ve enjoyed Keyes’s books on misattributed quotations very much and this looked like another good one. The pleasure did not last long, however; once I started reading it, I was appalled.

Ann Kirschner decided to conduct an experiment: which was the best way to read Dickens’s Little Dorrit? Paperback, audiobook, Amazon Kindle or its larger cousin the Kindle DX, or iPhone? The results are somewhat surprising.

One of the most important and the most chilling stories about the future of free speech is playing out in the British courts. Science writer Simon Singh has been sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association for calling chiropractic “bogus.” Singh lost in the lower courts and is appealing. His chances of winning are slim, as British libel laws are notoriously plaintiff-friendly. Worse still, one can sue in British courts if only one of the readers of the alleged libel is in Britain, making the UK the venue of choice for any organization that wants to silence its critics. If the British libel laws are allowed to stand, we are facing a new wave of censorship, this time via libel laws, that will allow corporations, trade associations, cults—any organization with pockets deep enough to hire lawyers—to silence their critics.