18 July 2007
On Monday, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show did a story on making English the official language of the US. Too funny.
Quotative Like
17 July 2007
Sunday’s International Herald Tribune has a piece on the quotative like, the use of the word like to introduce a quote, as in:
She was, like, “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that outfit.”
Like it or not, it appears as if this use of like is here to stay.
Top Ten Useful Yiddish Words
9 July 2007
Daniel Finkelstein, comment editor for The Times (London) provides a guide to using a handful of Yiddish words. Example, on the difference between the Yiddish shmooze and the English chat:
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton schmooze. Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton chat.
Americans may not understand all the references to Britons.
Old A Way With Words Articles
5 July 2007
I have begun adding articles from old issues of A Way With Words to the website. When I converted the site to the new format, I included all the AWWW articles that were in HTML format, but the older articles (2002-2005) were in PDF format and I did not convert them. I’m doing that now.
So far, I’ve added all the 2002 articles and I’ll be adding the rest in the coming couple of weeks. Unlike the Big List, I’m not updating these articles, so some of the statements in them are obsolete. But the articles are all marked with the original date of publication, so it should be easy to see that these were written some time ago.
So go ahead and browse through them. They are also accessible via the site’s search engine.
Second Life Dateline
4 July 2007
The Reuters news agency has been using “Second Life” as the location in the date line of stories about the online, virtual world. As in:
Ginko Financial - Pioneer or Pyramid?
Sun Oct 15, 2006 10:10pm PDTBy Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Oct 15 (Reuters) — If you make a 44 percent annual return in the real world it means you’re a genius hedge fund manager, or maybe Warren Buffett. In Second Life it means that you’re an account holder at Ginko Financial – unregulated, unaudited, and a magnet for controversy.
It’s an interesting meld of the cyber and real worlds.
