Wordorigins.org

Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University discusses the question of ”how does our language shape the way we think?”

Mark Peters over at Good has a blog post on the current ubiquity of fail. (He doesn’t like it, but respects its success.)

This month the Oxford English Dictionary released its quarterly update, covering the range from rean to recyclist. This material was originally published in 1904 under the editorship of William Craigie.

Along with the revised entries, several new words have been added. These include:

• bailout, n.2, the rescue of a financial institution
• car-booter, n., a British term for someone who attends car-boot (car trunk to us Yanks) sales
• rechallenge, n. and v., a return challenge, to challenge someone who has challenged you
• turducken, n., a culinary delight consisting of a boned chicken stuffed inside a boned duck, which in turn is stuffed inside a turkey.

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.